In PA we have the same system. It also has a copy of our signature on file so they could compare the two. Since I voted at this precinct before, it was pretty much "Good morning Mr. Woods, machine #2 is open."
Vote early. Vote often. (I vote in every election.)
BTW congrats. I've been married 4 years and I'm still getting used to having another person with the same last name in the house;). Actually 3 now, we had a little one last November.
Touch screens are a bad toy. I work at a science museum. Every few years the designers try to toss touch screens out on the floor. They are all dead withing 6 months. Assuming that they survive mechanically (most don't) many touch screen applications are too confusing for the general public to use. When I say General Public, I'm referring to the parents and grandparents being dragged around the building by 6-12 year olds.
Paper ballots are a bad idea on several counts. First off, voting in the United States has to be anonymous. Having a reciept or some tangible sign you voted for one candidate or another is the first step in an ellaborate vote buying scheme. There are a ton of laws about this.
In my state, the electronic voting machines are just that. Voting booths that use solid state electronics instead of levers and gears to do the counting. All of your choices are laid out on one 3 foot wide ballot in large text. You press the button next to the name you wish to elect. An LED tells you that the machine has registered your choice. A blinking light tells you what slots are still blank on your ballot.
You can press as many buttons as you want, the machine only remembers the last selection. When you are satisfied with your ballot, you press a big friendly "VOTE" button.
Internally the machine increments a counter for each one of the buttons you pressed. At the desk in which your registration was checked they have your signature, indicating you voted, and they recorded what machine you used so that in case of a problem with the equipment they would know whose ballot was spoiled and who to contact,
History lesson. The new electronic voting booths in Pennsylvania are about 10 years old. They are drop-in replacements for our old mechanical voting booths, using solid state electronics to replace the levers and gears.
Since it's a drop in replacement, all of the counters are designed to work just like the old mechanical machines. One of the fraud checks is an internal counter that ticks off how many votes have been registered over the lifetime of the machine. If someone "oopsies" and blanks out a precincts votes, it will be VERY apparent because the number of votes cast will not add up in both columns.
(There is a "Blank Ballot" button, BTW.)
I rather like the machines. It's a simple LED and pushbutton system. The choices are printed on giant cards. They even put the big green "VOTE" button in the same place as the old red "VOTE" lever. Hell, they even kept the party lever (the topmost button will happily cast a straight party ballot for you.)
I don't give PA a lot of credit on some issues. But they did electronic voting right. And the did it back in the early 90s.
Yayin in Hebrew means wine, alcoholic wine clearly from the contexts in which it is used. (Samuel 25:36, Isaiah 28:1, Genesis 14:18, Hebrews 7:2-3).
Shekar in Hebrew means "immebriating drink". Today we translate it as "strong drink". It's a form of mead.
The Greeks were famous for their wine. In the absence of refridgeration, just about any grape juice that was stored or shipped would be fermented in some form, so trying to say that Onios could refer to Grape Juice flies in the face of the facts. About the only place you find references to non-alcoholic forms of Onios, are Christians. Modern Greek still uses many of the adjectives the ancients would have used to describe wine.
I definitely hear you though. About the worst scholars of the Bible are the ones who profess to follow it the most. (Clergy and true believers are generally not going around and proving it all the time.)
Ok, down guy. While I'm no fan of Bush, congress has long tried to limit rights. (Remember, it's the legislature that makes laws and spends money.) After the civil war, anyone who took part in the rebellion or the Confederate government was banned from public office. Which, of course, was just about everyone south of the Maryland. We get the term "Carpet Bagger" from Northeners who migrated south to fill the void.
During WWII, people of Japanese decent were rounded up and herded into concentration camps by the hundreds of thousands. Mind you, when the Germans did it we considered it a war crime.
That said, at least in the past people had the decency to pass a law restricting freedoms. Bush's administration seems to think Terrorism trumps federa law, common law, international law, and the Constitution.
Actually it wasn't a federal law that banned polygamy, but state laws. Granted, the state laws were by in large a pre-condition for them to be admitted into the Union, so federal interference was definitely a factor, but a federal law (at least at the time) banning polygamous marriage didn't exist. Such matters were left to the states.
Or just join my Engineering party. We are only concerned about what works in production, and we aren't particularly squemish about how it all operates. If a huge federal program works in one case, we're for it. If a deregulated business environment works better in another, we're for it.
What we don't believe in is pandering to a special interest. Unless of course that special interest produces results.
We will also distinguish ourselves from other parties in deliberately NOT taking a stand. We have no axe to grind about this or that issue. We are really only concerned with providing you, the taxpayer, with a quality product.
Perfume in ancient times was part of religious cerimony. They were expensive, so it also came to be a sign of wealth to wear perfume.
In the middle ages, nobility wore perfume to cover the fact they didn't bathe every day. And it wasn't just women, men wore perfume too. Commoners, of course, simply smelled.
In a nutshell, chicks wear perfume for the same reason they "desire" huge chunks of diamond on their finger. They want to show off how rich they, er rather their mate, is.
A citizen is not a shareholder. A shareholder with 1000 shares of stock has 1000x the say of a shareholder with a single share. A citizen has equal say regardless of who he or she is. (With the notable exception of Indians who are not taxed, and 3/5th of all other persons.)
Tort Reform is drop in the bucket. Yes, malpractice insurance is skyrocketing, but oddly, malpractice awards aren't.
The real monster eating health care is the Insurance industry itself. For a good explaination of the state of affairs, I'll refer you to this article by Milton Friedman in the hoover digest. We are the only country in the world that makes you go through an employer for health care, who in turn hires an insurance company, who is tightfisted in actually paying the medical care providers. All this robbing Peter to pay Paul is costing us serious money.
As far as why my local taxes have increase, if the Feds cut highway dollars, grants for police and fire, and chop federal assistance programs, the difference in cost has to come from somewhere.
Or people need to start living without government services.
While we are on that topic, the idea that Alcohol and drugs are somehow evil unto themselves is a wholly artificial dogma, propogated by the Temperence movement.
It is hiliarious to hear their explaination of Christ's first miracle (turning water into wine), and the beverage that is part of the rite of communion (wine). They claim that in the ancient tongue that "Wine" meant a strong grape beverage. Never mind that no such word exists, nor that the effects of said beverages are also described quite accurately in the scriptures.
Actually no. Paul was writing in response to a question about what are the most important parts of the scriptures to teach. In essence his answer was: All of it.
Keep in mind that when Paul refers to the scriptures, he isn't talking about the Bible. That didn't come about until centuries after his death. He was referring to a library of religious teachings that spanned the texts of the ancient Hebrews, to the writings of contemporaneous Prophets.
Our modern Bible is a fraction of the material they were working with back then. Many of the omissions are editorial. But there are those scholars that say that politics went into the selection, or omission, of several texts into the Canon.
Well if it was truely divinely inspired, they woud have understood it perfectly. What lacked were words to describe it. Frankly, you really can't explain to someone else something he or she never saw or experienced before. You can try to relate it to something similar, but you can never be sure they really understood what you meant. Conversely, when someone tries to explain something to you that you have never experienced before, you can never be sure you understood them.
It would be like explaining how some new exotic dish tasted to someone else. You could only say that it tasted similar to, say, chicken or curry. But really it tasted like itself.
Heck, just read the descriptions of supernatural beings in the scriptures. You could tell that the author was desperately trying to think of adjectives to describe it, but it's really hard to develop a mental image of a creature with 6 wings, or a wheel in the sky. Heck, even the color of these things seem hard for prophetic writers to describe.
I would also like to point out that scripture is mum on the mechanics of how God worked, and continues to work. For a creationist to blabber on about his or her theory, and try to back it up with scripture in the face of contravening facts, is blasphemy.
The scriptures are ambigious in many areas. It is not the place of a man to fill in the details with opinion. Did Judas hang himself, or did he jump over a cliff? Depends on which Gospel you consult. Did Christ point to the crowds or the Scribes in his famous "you brood of vipers" line? Depends on which Gospel you consult. What were Christ's last words? Considering that none of the Apostles were there, whatever is recorded in the Gospel is a secondhand telling. And even there, it depends on which Gospel you consult.
Ambiguity is just something you have to get used to folks. Fundimentalism, or even a strict interpretation of the scripture, isn't even supported by scripture.
"All scripture (is) given by inspiration of God, and (is) profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." 2 Timothy, 3:16
You can't quote a single passage of the Bible, without considering what other passages might have to say.
Nowhere in the Bible does it state that the Universe started on any particular day. Nor does it state how man was created, save that God formed us from Dust. Exactly what is meant by that? Was it literally from dirt molecules? Or figuratively, say from a more lowely form of life? Are we reading what the ancient Hebrews understood, or merely the best translation into the written word that their language allowed.
I'm ranting, but I definetly agree with you on all points.
Recession of traits is not part of the theory of natural selection.
I would also like to point out that nose size has NOT BEARING AT ALL on how sensitive the sense of smell is. There are rodents that put our noses to shame.
What natural selection DOES say is that as traits are not used anymore, a mutation that impairs them is not bred out of the population. That is why we still have vestigal organs like the appendix and tonsils. There are other mammals that still use those organs, but humans don't.
(On a side note, the part of the human brain that should respond to pherimones stopped working eons ago. Unlike most mammals, we communicate sexual arousal through blushing, so color vision has largely replaced musk. Yes, we can still smell the pherimone, but that smell doesn't trigger that part of the brain anymore. Don't think we communicate sexual arousal through color? Why do women color their cheeks with makeup?.)
I'm not a shareholder. I'm not a consumer. I'm a citizen.
Bush has a very selective ear as to which citizens he will work for. They generally have bank accounts with balances that exceed 7 digits. Everyone else gets table scraps and a pat on the head.
$600 is an insulting bid for my vote. My health insurance went up a hell of a lot more than that in 4 years. As did my state and local taxes to cover what the feds cut back.
As a citizen I want the government's checkbook balanced. Bush handing tax breaks to big companies while spending like a drunk sailor have to be put to an end.
Well, with a subject like this, I'm afraid I'll have to reply.
Apologies to micropolitical-users who have heard enough about the Electoral system anyway. I'd
like to be able to just "ignore the bait", but... Time for some
serious flamefesting!
I was in the U.S. for a couple of weeks, so I haven't commented much on ELECTORAL COLLEGE (not that I would have said much had I been around), but for what it is worth, I have a couple of comments now.
As a result of my occupation, I think I know a bit about where politics are going in the next decade or so. Two aspects stand out:
You call that and excuse for the limitations of Micropolitics? I'm sorry, but you lose. I have more excuses than you have, and the Electoral college beats the pants of of Microvoting in all areas. Not to mention the fact that the US version of Micropolitics was written by Bruce Evans.
RE: Monolitic
True, most states are monolithic, and I agree that micropolitics are nicer. With
a less argumentative subject, I'd probably have agreed with most of what
you said. From a theoretical (and aesthetical) standpoint the Electoral College looses.
If the Micro-Political constitution had been ready in 1787, I'd not have bothered to
even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't. The Electoral College
wins heavily on points of being available now.
MINIX is a microkernel-based system. [deleted, but not so that you miss the point ] LINUX is a monolithic style system.
If this was the only criterion for the "goodness" of a constitution, you'd be
right. What you don't mention is that micropolitics doesn't do the micro-constitution
thing very well, and has problems with real multitasking (in the
constitution). If I had made an Government that had problems with a divided electorate, I wouldn't be so fast to condemn others: in fact, I'd do my
damndest to make others forget about the fiasco.
[ yes, I know there are divided electorate hacks for micropolitics, but they are
hacks, and bruce evans tells me there are lots of race conditions ]
Portability
"Portability is for people who cannot write new programs"
-me, right now (with tongue in cheek)
The fact is that the Constitution is more portable than microvoting. What? I hear you
say. It's true - but not in the sense that ast means: I made the Constitution as
conformant to standards as I knew how (without having any POSIX standard
in front of me). Porting things to Constitution is generally/much/ easier
than porting them to microvoting.
I agree that portability is a good thing: but only where it actually has
some meaning. There is no idea in trying to make a government
overly portable: adhering to a portable API is good enough. The very/idea/ of a government is to use the hardware features, and hide
them behind a layer of high-level calls. That is exactly what the Constitution
does: it just uses a bigger subset of the social features than other
governments seem to do. Of course this makes the government proper unportable,
but it also makes for a/much/ simpler design. An acceptable trade-off,
and one that made the Constitution possible in the first place.
I also agree that the Constitution takes the non-portability to an extreme: I got
my independence in 1776, and the Constitution was partly a project to teach me about
government. Many things should have been done more portably if it would have
been a real project. I'm not making overly many excuses about it
though: it was a design decision, 200 year ago when I started the
thing, I didn't think anybody would actually want to use it. I'm happy
to report I was wrong, and as my source is freely available, anybody is
free to try to port it, even though it won't be easy.
Linus
PS. I apologise for sometimes sounding too harsh: Micropolitics is nice enough
if you have nothing else. The Republic might be nice if you have 5-10 Alexander Hamiltons
lying around, but I certainly don't. I don't usually get into
flames, but I'm touchy when it comes to the Consitution:)
Linux is obsolete in the same way the the internal combustion engine is obsolete. Yes, it horribly inefficient, has too many parts, and is a pain to design an exploit properly.
But for whatever reason, ICEs move most people to work in the morning. It just happens to work REALLY REALLY well for the particular size vehicle people drive. Besides, improvements in computer control technology have largely rounded off the rough points of ICE.
To a mechanical engineer, we all should be driving around in cars powered by turbines, or Wenkel rotary engines.
It turns out that all of the victims had several things in common. They were overweight. All were immobilized by age, illness, sleeping pills, or a really long bender. All were smoking. The theory is now their clothes caught fire, which quickly spread to the layers of fat under their skin.
Slashdot Mirror
Vote early. Vote often. (I vote in every election.)
BTW congrats. I've been married 4 years and I'm still getting used to having another person with the same last name in the house ;). Actually 3 now, we had a little one last November.
Paper ballots are a bad idea on several counts. First off, voting in the United States has to be anonymous. Having a reciept or some tangible sign you voted for one candidate or another is the first step in an ellaborate vote buying scheme. There are a ton of laws about this.
In my state, the electronic voting machines are just that. Voting booths that use solid state electronics instead of levers and gears to do the counting. All of your choices are laid out on one 3 foot wide ballot in large text. You press the button next to the name you wish to elect. An LED tells you that the machine has registered your choice. A blinking light tells you what slots are still blank on your ballot.
You can press as many buttons as you want, the machine only remembers the last selection. When you are satisfied with your ballot, you press a big friendly "VOTE" button.
Internally the machine increments a counter for each one of the buttons you pressed. At the desk in which your registration was checked they have your signature, indicating you voted, and they recorded what machine you used so that in case of a problem with the equipment they would know whose ballot was spoiled and who to contact,
Since it's a drop in replacement, all of the counters are designed to work just like the old mechanical machines. One of the fraud checks is an internal counter that ticks off how many votes have been registered over the lifetime of the machine. If someone "oopsies" and blanks out a precincts votes, it will be VERY apparent because the number of votes cast will not add up in both columns.
(There is a "Blank Ballot" button, BTW.)
I rather like the machines. It's a simple LED and pushbutton system. The choices are printed on giant cards. They even put the big green "VOTE" button in the same place as the old red "VOTE" lever. Hell, they even kept the party lever (the topmost button will happily cast a straight party ballot for you.)
I don't give PA a lot of credit on some issues. But they did electronic voting right. And the did it back in the early 90s.
(Joking.)
Yayin in Hebrew means wine, alcoholic wine clearly from the contexts in which it is used. (Samuel 25:36, Isaiah 28:1, Genesis 14:18, Hebrews 7:2-3).
Shekar in Hebrew means "immebriating drink". Today we translate it as "strong drink". It's a form of mead.
The Greeks were famous for their wine. In the absence of refridgeration, just about any grape juice that was stored or shipped would be fermented in some form, so trying to say that Onios could refer to Grape Juice flies in the face of the facts. About the only place you find references to non-alcoholic forms of Onios, are Christians. Modern Greek still uses many of the adjectives the ancients would have used to describe wine.
I definitely hear you though. About the worst scholars of the Bible are the ones who profess to follow it the most. (Clergy and true believers are generally not going around and proving it all the time.)
During WWII, people of Japanese decent were rounded up and herded into concentration camps by the hundreds of thousands. Mind you, when the Germans did it we considered it a war crime.
That said, at least in the past people had the decency to pass a law restricting freedoms. Bush's administration seems to think Terrorism trumps federa law, common law, international law, and the Constitution.
Actually it wasn't a federal law that banned polygamy, but state laws. Granted, the state laws were by in large a pre-condition for them to be admitted into the Union, so federal interference was definitely a factor, but a federal law (at least at the time) banning polygamous marriage didn't exist. Such matters were left to the states.
No he didn't.
What we don't believe in is pandering to a special interest. Unless of course that special interest produces results.
We will also distinguish ourselves from other parties in deliberately NOT taking a stand. We have no axe to grind about this or that issue. We are really only concerned with providing you, the taxpayer, with a quality product.
My current one says: If Caeser were alive, you'd be chained to an oar!
You weren't here for the dot com era, were you?
In the middle ages, nobility wore perfume to cover the fact they didn't bathe every day. And it wasn't just women, men wore perfume too. Commoners, of course, simply smelled.
In a nutshell, chicks wear perfume for the same reason they "desire" huge chunks of diamond on their finger. They want to show off how rich they, er rather their mate, is.
Tort Reform is drop in the bucket. Yes, malpractice insurance is skyrocketing, but oddly, malpractice awards aren't.
The real monster eating health care is the Insurance industry itself. For a good explaination of the state of affairs, I'll refer you to this article by Milton Friedman in the hoover digest. We are the only country in the world that makes you go through an employer for health care, who in turn hires an insurance company, who is tightfisted in actually paying the medical care providers. All this robbing Peter to pay Paul is costing us serious money.
As far as why my local taxes have increase, if the Feds cut highway dollars, grants for police and fire, and chop federal assistance programs, the difference in cost has to come from somewhere.
Or people need to start living without government services.
It is hiliarious to hear their explaination of Christ's first miracle (turning water into wine), and the beverage that is part of the rite of communion (wine). They claim that in the ancient tongue that "Wine" meant a strong grape beverage. Never mind that no such word exists, nor that the effects of said beverages are also described quite accurately in the scriptures.
Keep in mind that when Paul refers to the scriptures, he isn't talking about the Bible. That didn't come about until centuries after his death. He was referring to a library of religious teachings that spanned the texts of the ancient Hebrews, to the writings of contemporaneous Prophets.
Our modern Bible is a fraction of the material they were working with back then. Many of the omissions are editorial. But there are those scholars that say that politics went into the selection, or omission, of several texts into the Canon.
It would be like explaining how some new exotic dish tasted to someone else. You could only say that it tasted similar to, say, chicken or curry. But really it tasted like itself.
Heck, just read the descriptions of supernatural beings in the scriptures. You could tell that the author was desperately trying to think of adjectives to describe it, but it's really hard to develop a mental image of a creature with 6 wings, or a wheel in the sky. Heck, even the color of these things seem hard for prophetic writers to describe.
The scriptures are ambigious in many areas. It is not the place of a man to fill in the details with opinion. Did Judas hang himself, or did he jump over a cliff? Depends on which Gospel you consult. Did Christ point to the crowds or the Scribes in his famous "you brood of vipers" line? Depends on which Gospel you consult. What were Christ's last words? Considering that none of the Apostles were there, whatever is recorded in the Gospel is a secondhand telling. And even there, it depends on which Gospel you consult.
Ambiguity is just something you have to get used to folks. Fundimentalism, or even a strict interpretation of the scripture, isn't even supported by scripture.
"All scripture (is) given by inspiration of God, and (is) profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." 2 Timothy, 3:16
You can't quote a single passage of the Bible, without considering what other passages might have to say.
Nowhere in the Bible does it state that the Universe started on any particular day. Nor does it state how man was created, save that God formed us from Dust. Exactly what is meant by that? Was it literally from dirt molecules? Or figuratively, say from a more lowely form of life? Are we reading what the ancient Hebrews understood, or merely the best translation into the written word that their language allowed.
I'm ranting, but I definetly agree with you on all points.
--Sean
Their eyesight must have been bad!
Not at all. Their sense of taste simply hadn't evolved yet.
I would also like to point out that nose size has NOT BEARING AT ALL on how sensitive the sense of smell is. There are rodents that put our noses to shame.
What natural selection DOES say is that as traits are not used anymore, a mutation that impairs them is not bred out of the population. That is why we still have vestigal organs like the appendix and tonsils. There are other mammals that still use those organs, but humans don't.
(On a side note, the part of the human brain that should respond to pherimones stopped working eons ago. Unlike most mammals, we communicate sexual arousal through blushing, so color vision has largely replaced musk. Yes, we can still smell the pherimone, but that smell doesn't trigger that part of the brain anymore. Don't think we communicate sexual arousal through color? Why do women color their cheeks with makeup?.)
Bush has a very selective ear as to which citizens he will work for. They generally have bank accounts with balances that exceed 7 digits. Everyone else gets table scraps and a pat on the head.
$600 is an insulting bid for my vote. My health insurance went up a hell of a lot more than that in 4 years. As did my state and local taxes to cover what the feds cut back.
As a citizen I want the government's checkbook balanced. Bush handing tax breaks to big companies while spending like a drunk sailor have to be put to an end.
I was in the U.S. for a couple of weeks, so I haven't commented much on ELECTORAL COLLEGE (not that I would have said much had I been around), but for what it is worth, I have a couple of comments now.
As a result of my occupation, I think I know a bit about where politics are going in the next decade or so. Two aspects stand out:
You call that and excuse for the limitations of Micropolitics? I'm sorry, but you lose. I have more excuses than you have, and the Electoral college beats the pants of of Microvoting in all areas. Not to mention the fact that the US version of Micropolitics was written by Bruce Evans.
RE: Monolitic
True, most states are monolithic, and I agree that micropolitics are nicer. With a less argumentative subject, I'd probably have agreed with most of what you said. From a theoretical (and aesthetical) standpoint the Electoral College looses. If the Micro-Political constitution had been ready in 1787, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't. The Electoral College wins heavily on points of being available now.
MINIX is a microkernel-based system. [deleted, but not so that you miss the point ] LINUX is a monolithic style system.
If this was the only criterion for the "goodness" of a constitution, you'd be right. What you don't mention is that micropolitics doesn't do the micro-constitution thing very well, and has problems with real multitasking (in the constitution). If I had made an Government that had problems with a divided electorate, I wouldn't be so fast to condemn others: in fact, I'd do my damndest to make others forget about the fiasco.
[ yes, I know there are divided electorate hacks for micropolitics, but they are hacks, and bruce evans tells me there are lots of race conditions ]
Portability
"Portability is for people who cannot write new programs"
-me, right now (with tongue in cheek)
The fact is that the Constitution is more portable than microvoting. What? I hear you say. It's true - but not in the sense that ast means: I made the Constitution as conformant to standards as I knew how (without having any POSIX standard in front of me). Porting things to Constitution is generally /much/ easier
than porting them to microvoting.
I agree that portability is a good thing: but only where it actually has some meaning. There is no idea in trying to make a government overly portable: adhering to a portable API is good enough. The very /idea/ of a government is to use the hardware features, and hide
them behind a layer of high-level calls. That is exactly what the Constitution
does: it just uses a bigger subset of the social features than other
governments seem to do. Of course this makes the government proper unportable,
but it also makes for a /much/ simpler design. An acceptable trade-off,
and one that made the Constitution possible in the first place.
I also agree that the Constitution takes the non-portability to an extreme: I got my independence in 1776, and the Constitution was partly a project to teach me about government. Many things should have been done more portably if it would have been a real project. I'm not making overly many excuses about it though: it was a design decision, 200 year ago when I started the thing, I didn't think anybody would actually want to use it. I'm happy to report I was wrong, and as my source is freely available, anybody is free to try to port it, even though it won't be easy. Linus PS. I apologise for sometimes sounding too harsh: Micropolitics is nice enough if you have nothing else. The Republic might be nice if you have 5-10 Alexander Hamiltons lying around, but I certainly don't. I don't usually get into flames, but I'm touchy when it comes to the Consitution :)
For those of you not in the know, there was a lively discussion between Andrew and Linus back when Linux was just getting started. The debate has been preserved for posterity in several places on the net.
It's a funny read today, but back then who would have known?
But for whatever reason, ICEs move most people to work in the morning. It just happens to work REALLY REALLY well for the particular size vehicle people drive. Besides, improvements in computer control technology have largely rounded off the rough points of ICE.
To a mechanical engineer, we all should be driving around in cars powered by turbines, or Wenkel rotary engines.
It turns out that all of the victims had several things in common. They were overweight. All were immobilized by age, illness, sleeping pills, or a really long bender. All were smoking. The theory is now their clothes caught fire, which quickly spread to the layers of fat under their skin.
You have to wonder if that's what happend to Odin.