The 'odds' are meaningless when it's done deliberately, like it often is.
If you are measuring something, or a bunch of things adding them together, to determine if something is X or not, there has to be a point where the percentage of false positives and false negatives are the same.
It is fairly easy to draw the trigger line at exactly that point. Y% of X score on one side of the line, and the same Y% of not-X score on the other side.
This is often, in fact, actually done. It's how they set the line when there's no obvious better way.
A family with two children is chosen at random from a large population.
If I tell you only that they have at least one daughter, what is the probability that both children are girls?
Most people can get that one (it's 1/3), but fail miserably on this question:
You are incorrect. Your statistic would be true if we were randomly picking family with two children until we came across one with (at least) one girl. There's a 1/3 odds there we'd pick one with two girls, and 2/3 that we'd pick one with just one.
However, that is not what you said. You said we picked the groups at random, and, hence, telling us the gender of a child tells us nothing about the other one. The genders are entirely independent of each other.
You can see how that works by imagining that the second child has not actually been born yet.
Or imagine it as coin flips. If I announce the result of one coin flip, it's not going to alter the other. If I make pairs of coin flips, and deliberately select a pair that has at least one tails in it, however, I have removed certain flips from the odds.
You actually understand this in your second example, and get the right odds, but surreally miss it in the first, despite using exactly the same example. If only girls are named Mary, saying one is named Mary is exactly identical to saying one is a girl. Your two examples are the same. You meant for your first example to be:
If we pick out two parents who have at least one girl, what are the odds that their other child is a girl?
That has the odds of 1/3, because the possibilities are M/F, F/M, and F/F.
And the really stupid thing is, since we don't know the cause of many case of SIDS (beyond, obviously, 'stopped breathing'), even if the deaths weren't unrelated...it's entirely likely the mother had nothing to do with them.
It could easily be some genetic thing, or it could be some environmental factor, or it could even be some parenting mistake that is not realized to be a mistake, like a certain posture while feeding causing death hours later. (Which certainly isn't murder, and isn't even manslaughter if no one knew any better.)
I.e., even if it was not a coincidence, which statistically, it certainly could be, doesn't mean the slightest amount of fault should attach to the mother whatsoever. 'Hello, we've decided to send you to jail because you have a gene making SIDS more like to happen.'
Of course, it was eventually determined that her second child died of a staphylococcus aureus infection, and she was released from jail.
Start with, say, $100,000. The more the better. Pick a color, let's say red.
Put $1 on red. Spin.
If it wins, take it off, start over at $1.
If it loses, put $2 on that color, spin. If that loses, put $4 on that color, $8, etc.
Feel free to change colors or odd/even, that's not actually important. Just keep betting on something with 50/50 odds, when you win, take the dollar, when you lose, double the last bet.
As long as that 50% (Well, 95% chance in roulette because of the 0 and 00.) chance happens before you run out of money, you made exactly $1.
If it does not happen, you lose all your money. If you start with $1023 dollars, you can go 9 times before you're out of money, which gives you a 1/1024 chance of losing it all. (Of course, that chance applies every time you start over at $1.
Also I was pretending it was a 50/50 chance, but it's not because of the aforementioned 0 and 00.
So it's a reverse lottery, but slanted away from you, just like a normal lottery. The odds are, most spins, you'll win exactly $1, but there's a slight chance you'll run out of money and lose your entire investment.
Just because the two numbers can be different doesn't mean you shouldn't assume someone is talking about them both when they use one number. That is the only sane way to parse '90% correct', that it is correct 90% of the time regardless of whom it is testing.
You know, when you state it that way, it's insane.
A test that always said 'not a terrorist' would have a 99.999999% success rate. It would have no false positives, and 100% false negatives, but considering how few actual positives there are, statistically, it would be a lot better than a 90% test.
While the other post is right saying that, if it's not stated, the 90% will refer to both false positives and false negatives, another more relevant point is the false negative can't work that way.
It can't falsely mark 10% of the population as non-terrorists, for the simple fact that 10% of the population isn't a terrorist.
No, a false negative means that it would fail to mark 10% of actual terrorists as terrorists, not 10% of the population as a whole.
Just like a 10% false positive would mean that it would would mark 10% of non-terrorists as terrorists, not 10% of everyone as terrorists. (Although, statistically, that's almost indistinguishable.)
And a 90% success rate, or a 10% failure rate, in absence of any specifics, is assumed to be both for negative and positive results.
Well, that example sorta fails because there are no actual terrorists in it.
A more sane example might be to get a group of a few hundred people, in, say, a auditorium, give them an envelope with a sheet of instructions, and a 20-sided die.
The instructions tell them if they're a terrorist or not, and tells them to roll the die and, depending on what it lands on, go to a specific labeled area. I.e., everyone goes to an area, differently, depending on what they rolled. You need about 20 areas.
Terrorists, of which you have a few, have a 9/10 chance to be sent to a 'terrorist' area, and everyone else has a 1/10 chance.
Everyone rolls, and goes to wherever, and at the end you realize which area was 'prison' and who got caught, and you ask everyone in that area to reveal their status, and you also ask all the other terrorists in other groups to step forward.
Or you could do this with badges and colored stickers, or something. The important thing is that people who are identified as 'terrorists' don't actually know they are until they're pointed out, which is a powerful psychological effect. (Which also means they shouldn't know who is a terrorist, or they'll realize it when grouped together.)
Could be a fairly powerful demonstration when people realize that 90% of the 'terrorist' group are innocent, and, while that group did catch most actual terrorists, there are a few still roaming around.
Hell, the TV show Alias was using p2p networks to transmit encoded messages a decade ago. At least once, Sidney was told to get a encoded message by search for and downloading a specific mp3 off Napster.
The best way to send private messages now, of course, would actually be usenet, as it's a hell of a lot harder to find downloads from that. With p2p, if someone tracks down what file gets posted with the secret info, they could track down the dozens of people downloading it, and maybe find a spy in that list, whereas there's absolutely no way to find out who's downloading a file off usenet without hijacking hundreds of servers.
So what the spy HQ should do is pick a TV show that airs each week, build a pirate rig that records it, and hides this week's messages in it. They should be able to hide hundreds of messages in a single TV show. This gets posted, regularly, to Usenet, in the right place. (It would be nice if they can get their release out before everyone else, so that thousands of people download it.)
All their spies should have software that pulls out the hidden message stream, but can only decrypt the message to them. I.e., there's a 10k message stream hidden in the file, but like 'Here's a message to #8374293, 'hatasfasdfrt', decode with your key. Here's a message to #9324924, 'asfsdga32', decode with your key'.(Although obviously in some actual format.)
You have even have emergency signaling, which would consist of any of a small set of fairly obscure movies posted to a different group. For when a message needs to go out 'off schedule'.
Also, obviously, TV shows don't run 52 weeks a year, but it should be possible to find some combination to cover them all.
You could actually do the same thing with torrents, even to the extent of using the same encoded file, and throwing it up on piratebay or something.
I was just going to suggest some sort of automated tool to do this, hidden on a flash drive, that looks like a normal Usenet client, and the spies making sure their client is set up as if it was looking in those newsgroups...but I realize that, hell, spies are very well trained, and if they need to fire up NewsBin and refresh headers and look for a specific name, every day, they are certainly capable of doing that. Beats having to sneak out to the park every day and look under the park bench.
Of course, this would only work for people who's cover is a) knowledgeable about computers, b) likes the show (This could be fixed by doing more than one show) and c) willing to break copyright law.
Oh, and, of course, I am only talking about the American moons. There have been at least six other objects placed in the sky thought history, that were somewhat like the current 'moon'.
The most famous, of course, being da Vinci wooden structure intended to defend Milan against attack, launched in 1497. Sadly, he could never figure out how to reach it after it was launched, spending the rest of his life attempting to construct some sort of flying device that would let him get up there. We are unsure what happened to it, although it is clearly no longer in the sky.
Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950.
WRONG.
The original Moon was launched as part of the Second New Deal as part of the Agricultural Adjustment Act. It was launched in the 1934 or 1935. (Accounts differ.) The 'Multiply Optics Organization' was created as way to allow farmers, many of whom still had not electrified their houses, have enough light to see by using mirrors. It started out small, with mirrors lighting the insides of buildings, but then they started a program called 'Night Light' intended to light up the entire place at night.
Hence the 'Multiply Optics Organization Night Light', aka, the 'Moon'. (Technically 'Moonl', but that would be hard to say.)
And it, in fact, unlike the modern Moon, did simply reflect the light of the sun. (Which is where that urban legend comes from.) It was very efficient, just a large reflective surface. Although the Rural Electrification Administration proved rather too successful in actually getting people electricity, so this purpose was quickly forgotten.
The original Moon was repurposed as a 'spy satellite' during WWII and was shot at by the Germans near the end of the war. Eventually, they crippled it, after years of failed attempts, although much too late to do them any good. This forced the Air Force to deorbited three years later in early July 1947, in the American Southwest, under the code name 'Mogul'.
What you are referring to, with the 1950 reference, is commonly called 'the new moon', which was relaunched in November 11, 1950, under the code name 'Luna'. It was an information gathering device, with the 'database' (paper, of course, in the 1950s) you are referring to created the same time in Los Angeles, not Berkeley under the code name 'Mattachine'. A nuclear bomb was detonated over Canada the day before to divert attention away from the launch. It caused massive storms the rest of the month due to a miscalculation in the launch, suspected to be due to the metric conversion.
The US had not planned to put another Moon after the first was shot down, but eventually designed and built one in reaction to the Soviets gaining the bomb in the early 1950. Because they were not planning on putting another up, they had already scrubbed all references to the previous Moon, causing no end of confusion to people trying to figure out what really happened.
The base of operations was not moved to Berkley until the 60s, when it was computerized. And it wasn't until then that the entire program was hijacked by liberals. Before that, it was anti-communist, unlike the first Moon. That is what JFK was attempting to do with his Moon program...claim it for himself and the liberals. (Which is why the Italians killed him.)
Also, the current moon is almost entirely powered by solar energy now. Jimmy Carter put a bunch of solar panels up there. The fusion reactors just move it in emergency situations, like an NRA convention.
There is a lot of misinformation out there about both Moons, both amazing technological wonders of their time.
You know, you're actually right. We certainly didn't go to the moon. I wasn't even born in the 1960s.
People keeping saying we went to the moon....no, I really did not. I don't know what the hell you were doing, but I certainly didn't, keep me out of your moon alibi, I'm not going to pretend I was at this 'moon' you keep asserting we were at together. (If this is some legal thing, I will gladly testify in court that I was not on the moon at any specific date, because I have never been on the moon, no matter how many people assert we went there in there 1960s.)
I'm mean, it's pretty stupid, as far as lies go. NASA, which as far as I can tell are the only people who've even been up there, keeps records of everyone who's gone up. Am I on that list? Um, no, I am not. How did I get to the moon if I didn't take NASA, huh? Walk?
It's obviously computer generated. Try disconnecting your internet connection, and the damn thing won't even work, cause it can't talk to whatever supercomputer is generating all this fakery to get it to make more.
Actually, it would hit the atmosphere and start falling a good deal more rapidly as drag slows do the orbit, and it would also start ripping the atmosphere away.
People would be long dead by then, though, as tidal effects cause massive earthquakes and tides.
The actual 'collision' would be pretty moot to anyone who actually lived here, but it would probably, indeed, destroy all existing continental shelves as it plowed a huge gash around the entire planet attempting to slow down. The safest place would be at the poles.
But, anyway, there's no actual mechanism where this would happen...the moon is moving further away thanks to it stealing angular moment from us, and getting faster in its orbit, which means it orbits slightly farther out. We meanwhile, rotate a tiny bit slower.
I mean, it does by itself, but I thought the earth was also tidal-locking itself to the sun at the same time, and is going to do that first.
And obviously the earth can't both be tidal-locked to the sun and the moon unless the moon stops moving through orbit, which would, in fact, cause it to fall on us. (Or, rather, slowly come in until it hits the atmosphere and have everything fall apart.)
Oh, and for all you disappointed people that the sun will supernova before the earth tidal locks...it's entirely possible that Mercury will tidal lock to the sun before that. It's already spinning so slowly we thought it was tidal locked for a very long time. A day takes 2/3rds of its year, and it's just going to get longer and longer until it takes exactly one year.
No, the earth will lock to the sun first, and one side of the planet would boil.
...except it won't, because the sun will supernova first, but pretending it didn't, the earth would stop spinning in relation to the sun.
After that, the moon's orbit would continue to slow down until it, indeed, could only see one side of the earth. I.e., what you described, except it's not the earth stopping turning in relation to the moon, it's that the moon stopping moving around it.
...except, of course, it would have already crashed into the earth at that point, having no orbital velocity. You can't just sit there in orbit not moving.
But pretending that all this would happen before the sun went supernova, and pretending that the moon could hover in orbit without any velocity, yeah, the moon will eventually see only one side of the earth.;)
One gaping hole in that bit of logic: the people running the dispensaries are the same people who were dealing illegaly before!
Well, yes, that is, indeed, the gaping hole of logic there, although I'd suggest it was on the part of your government. I have no idea why you're let drug dealers sell drugs legally, or not regulate them in any way.
This always struck me as the really stupid logic gap on the part of pot legalization people. I'm against having it illegal, also, but I'm also against just letting people grow and sell it willy-nilly. Yes, people should be able to grow it and whatnot for themselves, and sell plants and seeds, but we do not normally sell legal drugs in this country out of car trunks on the side of the road.
Just like you can buy an aloe plant, and use that, but people don't normally buy big bags of aloe gell from random people. Or you can own a willow tree, and maybe some crazy people make their own aspirin, but most people just buy it at the drug store.
We do not normally allow criminals, especially criminals who illegally sold controlled substances, to be pharmacologists in this country. And we do not let pharmacologists make their own drugs, we do not allow them to purchase drugs that have been smuggled into this country, we do not allow them to sell randomly varying potency (Even with plants, you can make their potency fairly consistent..but not if you buy parts of random shipments from god-knows-where.), we require them to keep very exacting records, etc.
Hell, that's true of damn liquor stores and bars. Your state apparently decided to go straight from 'illegal' to 'child's lemonade stand' level of regulation.
Seriously, you pro-legalization people...I'm right there with you, it is idiotic pot is illegal. Forget using it as medicine, it should be legal, period. (Other drugs should be legal once a doctor has determined addition, as long as you're in a program to manage and hopefully reduce your addition.)
But pot needs to be a legal controlled substance like aspirin, or alcohol, sold by actual businesses with actual licenses and real quality and inventory control, not some crazy-ass business that operates like some guy selling hand-painted beads at a flea market.
But, anyway, what has apparently happened is that demand has, in fact, gone up. So obviously prices have also. That is the normal result...I was just trying to explain why prices would have gone up if demand went down, because I was assuming that, as would have happened in non-crazyville, that legal drugs were being sold by other, new people.
Or, to phrase it another way, almost all pyramid schemes are hiding as MLMs.
Which obviously does not make all MLM pyramid schemes.
The real distinction is if the entire thing costs money to people who join.
I.e., if I sign up, for free, and get paid 5% for each sale 'made by me', and if I sign up others up and get 3% for each of their sales, etc, that's a legit MLM. (And, in fact, an entirely reasonable way to run a referral service, although most places now just make a flat one-time payout of X dollars when anyone you sign up sells Y amount of goods.)
But if I paid money to get in, and most of my incoming money is from other people paying to get in, then it's an illegal pyramid scheme.
There's some actual percentage of real 'goods' you have to actually sell, and most pyramid schemes spend almost all their time trying to weasel around this, by requiring people to buy 'goods'...to be in the program. (Which is obviously just another way to charge people for being in the program.)
But in my book, any referral/commission based sales that requires you to pay to sell their stuff is a scam, period.
If they promise you'll make your money back by signing other people up, it's an illegal pyramid scheme, if they promise you'll make your money back selling their stuff it's still a scam, it's probably just, sadly, a legal one. (That really should be a violation of minimum wage laws. They're paying people negative money to work for them! Yes, we don't know how much time, but any amount of time is still a negative payscale.)
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Computer repair is no more engineering than auto repair is.
Fixing shit!=engineering
Engineering is designing shit.
The 'odds' are meaningless when it's done deliberately, like it often is.
If you are measuring something, or a bunch of things adding them together, to determine if something is X or not, there has to be a point where the percentage of false positives and false negatives are the same.
It is fairly easy to draw the trigger line at exactly that point. Y% of X score on one side of the line, and the same Y% of not-X score on the other side.
This is often, in fact, actually done. It's how they set the line when there's no obvious better way.
A family with two children is chosen at random from a large population.
If I tell you only that they have at least one daughter, what is the probability that both children are girls?
Most people can get that one (it's 1/3), but fail miserably on this question:
You are incorrect. Your statistic would be true if we were randomly picking family with two children until we came across one with (at least) one girl. There's a 1/3 odds there we'd pick one with two girls, and 2/3 that we'd pick one with just one.
However, that is not what you said. You said we picked the groups at random, and, hence, telling us the gender of a child tells us nothing about the other one. The genders are entirely independent of each other.
You can see how that works by imagining that the second child has not actually been born yet.
Or imagine it as coin flips. If I announce the result of one coin flip, it's not going to alter the other. If I make pairs of coin flips, and deliberately select a pair that has at least one tails in it, however, I have removed certain flips from the odds.
You actually understand this in your second example, and get the right odds, but surreally miss it in the first, despite using exactly the same example. If only girls are named Mary, saying one is named Mary is exactly identical to saying one is a girl. Your two examples are the same. You meant for your first example to be:
If we pick out two parents who have at least one girl, what are the odds that their other child is a girl?
That has the odds of 1/3, because the possibilities are M/F, F/M, and F/F.
What the hell is a terrorist going to do on an airplane, anyway? Rage ineffectually at the cockpit door until people bum rush him?
I think a more useful attack would be to detonate a bomb in the screening line.
And the really stupid thing is, since we don't know the cause of many case of SIDS (beyond, obviously, 'stopped breathing'), even if the deaths weren't unrelated...it's entirely likely the mother had nothing to do with them.
It could easily be some genetic thing, or it could be some environmental factor, or it could even be some parenting mistake that is not realized to be a mistake, like a certain posture while feeding causing death hours later. (Which certainly isn't murder, and isn't even manslaughter if no one knew any better.)
I.e., even if it was not a coincidence, which statistically, it certainly could be, doesn't mean the slightest amount of fault should attach to the mother whatsoever. 'Hello, we've decided to send you to jail because you have a gene making SIDS more like to happen.'
Of course, it was eventually determined that her second child died of a staphylococcus aureus infection, and she was released from jail.
You can play roulette as a reverse lottery.
Start with, say, $100,000. The more the better. Pick a color, let's say red.
Put $1 on red. Spin.
If it wins, take it off, start over at $1.
If it loses, put $2 on that color, spin. If that loses, put $4 on that color, $8, etc.
Feel free to change colors or odd/even, that's not actually important. Just keep betting on something with 50/50 odds, when you win, take the dollar, when you lose, double the last bet.
As long as that 50% (Well, 95% chance in roulette because of the 0 and 00.) chance happens before you run out of money, you made exactly $1.
If it does not happen, you lose all your money. If you start with $1023 dollars, you can go 9 times before you're out of money, which gives you a 1/1024 chance of losing it all. (Of course, that chance applies every time you start over at $1.
Also I was pretending it was a 50/50 chance, but it's not because of the aforementioned 0 and 00. So it's a reverse lottery, but slanted away from you, just like a normal lottery. The odds are, most spins, you'll win exactly $1, but there's a slight chance you'll run out of money and lose your entire investment.
Just because the two numbers can be different doesn't mean you shouldn't assume someone is talking about them both when they use one number. That is the only sane way to parse '90% correct', that it is correct 90% of the time regardless of whom it is testing.
Convict?
We don't convict terrorists anymore, fool. We just imprison them for years without charge, and sometimes torture them.
If you're a lesser terrorist, we just keep you from flying on airplanes. (But, surprisingly, let you roam free.)
You know, when you state it that way, it's insane.
A test that always said 'not a terrorist' would have a 99.999999% success rate. It would have no false positives, and 100% false negatives, but considering how few actual positives there are, statistically, it would be a lot better than a 90% test.
While the other post is right saying that, if it's not stated, the 90% will refer to both false positives and false negatives, another more relevant point is the false negative can't work that way.
It can't falsely mark 10% of the population as non-terrorists, for the simple fact that 10% of the population isn't a terrorist.
No, a false negative means that it would fail to mark 10% of actual terrorists as terrorists, not 10% of the population as a whole.
Just like a 10% false positive would mean that it would would mark 10% of non-terrorists as terrorists, not 10% of everyone as terrorists. (Although, statistically, that's almost indistinguishable.)
And a 90% success rate, or a 10% failure rate, in absence of any specifics, is assumed to be both for negative and positive results.
Oh, and bonus points if you figure out a way to allow terrorists to swap their dice rolls with some other person, aka, identify theft.
Well, that example sorta fails because there are no actual terrorists in it.
A more sane example might be to get a group of a few hundred people, in, say, a auditorium, give them an envelope with a sheet of instructions, and a 20-sided die.
The instructions tell them if they're a terrorist or not, and tells them to roll the die and, depending on what it lands on, go to a specific labeled area. I.e., everyone goes to an area, differently, depending on what they rolled. You need about 20 areas.
Terrorists, of which you have a few, have a 9/10 chance to be sent to a 'terrorist' area, and everyone else has a 1/10 chance.
Everyone rolls, and goes to wherever, and at the end you realize which area was 'prison' and who got caught, and you ask everyone in that area to reveal their status, and you also ask all the other terrorists in other groups to step forward.
Or you could do this with badges and colored stickers, or something. The important thing is that people who are identified as 'terrorists' don't actually know they are until they're pointed out, which is a powerful psychological effect. (Which also means they shouldn't know who is a terrorist, or they'll realize it when grouped together.)
Could be a fairly powerful demonstration when people realize that 90% of the 'terrorist' group are innocent, and, while that group did catch most actual terrorists, there are a few still roaming around.
Hell, the TV show Alias was using p2p networks to transmit encoded messages a decade ago. At least once, Sidney was told to get a encoded message by search for and downloading a specific mp3 off Napster.
The best way to send private messages now, of course, would actually be usenet, as it's a hell of a lot harder to find downloads from that. With p2p, if someone tracks down what file gets posted with the secret info, they could track down the dozens of people downloading it, and maybe find a spy in that list, whereas there's absolutely no way to find out who's downloading a file off usenet without hijacking hundreds of servers.
So what the spy HQ should do is pick a TV show that airs each week, build a pirate rig that records it, and hides this week's messages in it. They should be able to hide hundreds of messages in a single TV show. This gets posted, regularly, to Usenet, in the right place. (It would be nice if they can get their release out before everyone else, so that thousands of people download it.)
All their spies should have software that pulls out the hidden message stream, but can only decrypt the message to them. I.e., there's a 10k message stream hidden in the file, but like 'Here's a message to #8374293, 'hatasfasdfrt', decode with your key. Here's a message to #9324924, 'asfsdga32', decode with your key'.(Although obviously in some actual format.)
You have even have emergency signaling, which would consist of any of a small set of fairly obscure movies posted to a different group. For when a message needs to go out 'off schedule'.
Also, obviously, TV shows don't run 52 weeks a year, but it should be possible to find some combination to cover them all.
You could actually do the same thing with torrents, even to the extent of using the same encoded file, and throwing it up on piratebay or something.
I was just going to suggest some sort of automated tool to do this, hidden on a flash drive, that looks like a normal Usenet client, and the spies making sure their client is set up as if it was looking in those newsgroups...but I realize that, hell, spies are very well trained, and if they need to fire up NewsBin and refresh headers and look for a specific name, every day, they are certainly capable of doing that. Beats having to sneak out to the park every day and look under the park bench.
Of course, this would only work for people who's cover is a) knowledgeable about computers, b) likes the show (This could be fixed by doing more than one show) and c) willing to break copyright law.
Also leave out the 'great thriller' part.
Oh, and, of course, I am only talking about the American moons. There have been at least six other objects placed in the sky thought history, that were somewhat like the current 'moon'.
The most famous, of course, being da Vinci wooden structure intended to defend Milan against attack, launched in 1497. Sadly, he could never figure out how to reach it after it was launched, spending the rest of his life attempting to construct some sort of flying device that would let him get up there. We are unsure what happened to it, although it is clearly no longer in the sky.
Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950.
WRONG.
The original Moon was launched as part of the Second New Deal as part of the Agricultural Adjustment Act. It was launched in the 1934 or 1935. (Accounts differ.) The 'Multiply Optics Organization' was created as way to allow farmers, many of whom still had not electrified their houses, have enough light to see by using mirrors. It started out small, with mirrors lighting the insides of buildings, but then they started a program called 'Night Light' intended to light up the entire place at night.
Hence the 'Multiply Optics Organization Night Light', aka, the 'Moon'. (Technically 'Moonl', but that would be hard to say.)
And it, in fact, unlike the modern Moon, did simply reflect the light of the sun. (Which is where that urban legend comes from.) It was very efficient, just a large reflective surface. Although the Rural Electrification Administration proved rather too successful in actually getting people electricity, so this purpose was quickly forgotten.
The original Moon was repurposed as a 'spy satellite' during WWII and was shot at by the Germans near the end of the war. Eventually, they crippled it, after years of failed attempts, although much too late to do them any good. This forced the Air Force to deorbited three years later in early July 1947, in the American Southwest, under the code name 'Mogul'.
What you are referring to, with the 1950 reference, is commonly called 'the new moon', which was relaunched in November 11, 1950, under the code name 'Luna'. It was an information gathering device, with the 'database' (paper, of course, in the 1950s) you are referring to created the same time in Los Angeles, not Berkeley under the code name 'Mattachine'. A nuclear bomb was detonated over Canada the day before to divert attention away from the launch. It caused massive storms the rest of the month due to a miscalculation in the launch, suspected to be due to the metric conversion.
The US had not planned to put another Moon after the first was shot down, but eventually designed and built one in reaction to the Soviets gaining the bomb in the early 1950. Because they were not planning on putting another up, they had already scrubbed all references to the previous Moon, causing no end of confusion to people trying to figure out what really happened.
The base of operations was not moved to Berkley until the 60s, when it was computerized. And it wasn't until then that the entire program was hijacked by liberals. Before that, it was anti-communist, unlike the first Moon. That is what JFK was attempting to do with his Moon program...claim it for himself and the liberals. (Which is why the Italians killed him.)
Also, the current moon is almost entirely powered by solar energy now. Jimmy Carter put a bunch of solar panels up there. The fusion reactors just move it in emergency situations, like an NRA convention.
There is a lot of misinformation out there about both Moons, both amazing technological wonders of their time.
We never went to the moon, period.
You know, you're actually right. We certainly didn't go to the moon. I wasn't even born in the 1960s.
People keeping saying we went to the moon....no, I really did not. I don't know what the hell you were doing, but I certainly didn't, keep me out of your moon alibi, I'm not going to pretend I was at this 'moon' you keep asserting we were at together. (If this is some legal thing, I will gladly testify in court that I was not on the moon at any specific date, because I have never been on the moon, no matter how many people assert we went there in there 1960s.)
I'm mean, it's pretty stupid, as far as lies go. NASA, which as far as I can tell are the only people who've even been up there, keeps records of everyone who's gone up. Am I on that list? Um, no, I am not. How did I get to the moon if I didn't take NASA, huh? Walk?
It's obviously computer generated. Try disconnecting your internet connection, and the damn thing won't even work, cause it can't talk to whatever supercomputer is generating all this fakery to get it to make more.
Actually, it would hit the atmosphere and start falling a good deal more rapidly as drag slows do the orbit, and it would also start ripping the atmosphere away.
People would be long dead by then, though, as tidal effects cause massive earthquakes and tides.
The actual 'collision' would be pretty moot to anyone who actually lived here, but it would probably, indeed, destroy all existing continental shelves as it plowed a huge gash around the entire planet attempting to slow down. The safest place would be at the poles.
But, anyway, there's no actual mechanism where this would happen...the moon is moving further away thanks to it stealing angular moment from us, and getting faster in its orbit, which means it orbits slightly farther out. We meanwhile, rotate a tiny bit slower.
That does not sound correct to me.
I mean, it does by itself, but I thought the earth was also tidal-locking itself to the sun at the same time, and is going to do that first.
And obviously the earth can't both be tidal-locked to the sun and the moon unless the moon stops moving through orbit, which would, in fact, cause it to fall on us. (Or, rather, slowly come in until it hits the atmosphere and have everything fall apart.)
Oh, and for all you disappointed people that the sun will supernova before the earth tidal locks...it's entirely possible that Mercury will tidal lock to the sun before that. It's already spinning so slowly we thought it was tidal locked for a very long time. A day takes 2/3rds of its year, and it's just going to get longer and longer until it takes exactly one year.
No, the earth will lock to the sun first, and one side of the planet would boil.
After that, the moon's orbit would continue to slow down until it, indeed, could only see one side of the earth. I.e., what you described, except it's not the earth stopping turning in relation to the moon, it's that the moon stopping moving around it.
But pretending that all this would happen before the sun went supernova, and pretending that the moon could hover in orbit without any velocity, yeah, the moon will eventually see only one side of the earth. ;)
One gaping hole in that bit of logic: the people running the dispensaries are the same people who were dealing illegaly before!
Well, yes, that is, indeed, the gaping hole of logic there, although I'd suggest it was on the part of your government. I have no idea why you're let drug dealers sell drugs legally, or not regulate them in any way.
This always struck me as the really stupid logic gap on the part of pot legalization people. I'm against having it illegal, also, but I'm also against just letting people grow and sell it willy-nilly. Yes, people should be able to grow it and whatnot for themselves, and sell plants and seeds, but we do not normally sell legal drugs in this country out of car trunks on the side of the road.
Just like you can buy an aloe plant, and use that, but people don't normally buy big bags of aloe gell from random people. Or you can own a willow tree, and maybe some crazy people make their own aspirin, but most people just buy it at the drug store.
We do not normally allow criminals, especially criminals who illegally sold controlled substances, to be pharmacologists in this country. And we do not let pharmacologists make their own drugs, we do not allow them to purchase drugs that have been smuggled into this country, we do not allow them to sell randomly varying potency (Even with plants, you can make their potency fairly consistent..but not if you buy parts of random shipments from god-knows-where.), we require them to keep very exacting records, etc.
Hell, that's true of damn liquor stores and bars. Your state apparently decided to go straight from 'illegal' to 'child's lemonade stand' level of regulation.
Seriously, you pro-legalization people...I'm right there with you, it is idiotic pot is illegal. Forget using it as medicine, it should be legal, period. (Other drugs should be legal once a doctor has determined addition, as long as you're in a program to manage and hopefully reduce your addition.)
But pot needs to be a legal controlled substance like aspirin, or alcohol, sold by actual businesses with actual licenses and real quality and inventory control, not some crazy-ass business that operates like some guy selling hand-painted beads at a flea market.
But, anyway, what has apparently happened is that demand has, in fact, gone up. So obviously prices have also. That is the normal result...I was just trying to explain why prices would have gone up if demand went down, because I was assuming that, as would have happened in non-crazyville, that legal drugs were being sold by other, new people.
Or, to phrase it another way, almost all pyramid schemes are hiding as MLMs.
Which obviously does not make all MLM pyramid schemes.
The real distinction is if the entire thing costs money to people who join.
I.e., if I sign up, for free, and get paid 5% for each sale 'made by me', and if I sign up others up and get 3% for each of their sales, etc, that's a legit MLM. (And, in fact, an entirely reasonable way to run a referral service, although most places now just make a flat one-time payout of X dollars when anyone you sign up sells Y amount of goods.)
But if I paid money to get in, and most of my incoming money is from other people paying to get in, then it's an illegal pyramid scheme.
There's some actual percentage of real 'goods' you have to actually sell, and most pyramid schemes spend almost all their time trying to weasel around this, by requiring people to buy 'goods'...to be in the program. (Which is obviously just another way to charge people for being in the program.)
But in my book, any referral/commission based sales that requires you to pay to sell their stuff is a scam, period.
If they promise you'll make your money back by signing other people up, it's an illegal pyramid scheme, if they promise you'll make your money back selling their stuff it's still a scam, it's probably just, sadly, a legal one. (That really should be a violation of minimum wage laws. They're paying people negative money to work for them! Yes, we don't know how much time, but any amount of time is still a negative payscale.)
Duke Nukem Forever didn't cost anyone money except the company that (failed to) make it.