I wish I had some of that.
I have a radio box on top of a grain elevator. When it gets cold enough, the radios quit working until I go up and reset them after it warms up.
Hundreds of elephants attend the traditional yearly roundup in November; most are related, so it?s a big family reunion. They no longer work at logging, so many are employed as performers. It was a field day for man and elephant, and included elephant soccer, basketball, and talent shows, and elephant rides. WK was distressed to learn that elephants often cheat at soccer; they grab the ball with their trunks, run it close to the goal, then drop-kick it. Actually, think about that for a minute.
There was a story in one of the Houston papers (when Houston had both the Post and the Chronicle) about Texas and New York lawyers.
It seems that the New York lawyers sometimes interpret a Texas drawl as a mark of being a bit slow. This led to occasional underestimations of the skill of the Texas lawyers.
The result is that the Texas lawyers would sometimes get minor provisions put into a contract because the New York lawyers didn't perceive the threat and would overlook their importance.
Under some circumstances, the provision became turned out to be a major advantage to the Texas company.
Computer neural networks are modelled on how we think the human brain works
Neural networks are relatively simplistic models. A single neuron in a neural network is inherentlyh linear -- it determines the classification of an item based on which side of a dividing line the item is on. By adding neurons and layers of neurons, we can make the shapes of the classification of data nonlinear.
The learning mechanism of a neural network doesn't mimic the real neurons much at all. In fact, once trained, a particular input to a neural network will return the exact same output. A real neuron is not going to be as predictable. For that matter, in real neurons, the firing of a synapse in the presence of an impulse is a question of probability.
the connections between neurons in the brain aren't electronic like you might think
That is largely true. Synapses use chemical messengers to transfer the signal from axons to dendrites.
When the pre-synaptic bouton is excited, it releases a packet of neurotransmitters into the synaptic cleft, a small gap between the membranes of the two neurons at the synapse. The neurotransmitters diffuse quickly across the cleft and some will bind to receptors on the post-synaptic terminal. This binding causes certain tiny pores to open which then admit a number of ions into the neuron and results in the build up the charge.
Note that different synapses use different neurotransmitters and the dynamics behave somewhat differently depending on the neurotransmitter used. Thus, it is not enough to know which neurons are connected to which via the synapses, but one would also have to know which types of synapses are present.
Inside of the dendritic membrane on the post-synaptic side, there is also a thickening called the post-synaptic density. Modifications in this area may also have some effect in modulating the nature of the signal.
Also, some synapses are excitatory and some are
inhibitory. The inhibitory synapses are typically located close to the cell body or soma and can copletely block the neuron from signalling.
The signal can also depend on where the synapses are located. The closer to the soma, the stronger the effect, in general. There are even some types of neurons that may synapse on the axon in some instances. When that happens, the synapses are very close to or on the axonal hillock where the axom emerges from the soma.
The axonal hillock seems to be the part of the cell that allows the signal to propagate down the axon or that does not allow that propagation.
There is another kind of synapse called a gap junction. Unlike synapses, gap junctions transmit the signal very quickly from one neuron to another. However, gap junctions are not all that common.
The real question is not the numerical amount of the winnings compared to the bet, but the value of the money in what you can do with it.
For example, assume the ticket costs $1 and the payout to a single winner is $25,000,000.
What is the real value of that $1 to you? Probably not a whole lot. It's not even a hamburger. Maybe a small coke.
That $1 is just not going to make much difference in your life.
How about $25,000,000? That can make a huge difference in your life. Even adjusting for present value and taking out taxes, you can probably still retire, open your own medium size business, pay off your bookie,....
So the real value of $25,000,000 in terms of what it can potentially do for you may be much more than the strict odds on the gamble.
But considering how most people who win seem to blow the money, the value to them may be much less than would be expected.
I used to used my own date routines on the old PDP-11 and Vax computers. It stored the date in a 32 bit integer as the number of days since and including March 2, 1836 That is, March 2, 1836 was day 1, March 3, 1836 was day 2,... .
March 2, 1836 was the date that the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed in Washington-on-the-Brazos.
At that time, the Alamo was under siege by Santa Anna's troops. It fell four days later on March 6, 1836.
Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.
Then, it appears to be permissible for the state legislature to appoint the electors. But note that it states that the legislature directs the manner in which they are selected, not the selection itself.
I did a quick web search and found this web site that provides a table of how the electors are chosen in the various states: How States and Parties Choose Electors. Just click on the table if you have javascript enabled on your browser.
From the table, it appears that only Wisconsin leaves the selection of electors up to the "Legislators & candidates". And the Democratic Party electors in California are chosen by Democrats running in the U.S. House and Senate races to choose the electors.
The electors in most states are chosen by the party's state convention or by the party.
The table seems to be from a 1983 publication. There has undoubtedly been some changes since then.
A little more searching finds this more up to date web page: Which electors are bound?. According to it, states (and DC) binding electors to vote for their pledged candidates are Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, DC, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. So, 26 states and the District of Columbia bind their electors.
But note that it also says:
Keep in mind that just because a state has a law requiring an elector to vote a certain way does not mean the elector must do so. People break the law all the time, and a would-be faithless elector could change his vote and just face the consequences. However,
no faithless elector has ever been punished for his vote. In North Carolina, South Carolina, and Michigan, faithless electors are replaced before their vote can be sent to Congress.
The legislatures may set rules on the who may serve as an elector, but as far as I know, none choose the electors. If a state passed a law allowing the legislature to choose the electors, I expect that it would be quickly struck down by the Supreme Court.
Also, not all states have such laws requiring electors to vote for their candidate. I think that less than half the states require the electors to vote for their party's nomination. Electors who do not vote for their party's candidate are known as "faithless electors".
In 2000, there was concern by some Republicans that the Democrats might convince enough Republican electors to vote for Gore instead of Bush that Gore could have won the election.
For what it's worth, one of the Democratic electors in 2000 abstained from casting an electoral vote.
One of the most interesting was in 1972. One elector could not bring himself to vote for Richard Nixon. Instead, he went outside of the Republican party to cast his vote for the Libertarian candidates for President and Vice President. The Libertarian Vice President candidate was a woman. As a result, she was the first woman to ever receive a vote in the electoral college.
There is some serious question over whether President Kennedy won the popular vote in 1960.
The technique used to decide who got the popular vote quite probably awarded votes to President Kennedy that he did not, in fact, get.
The following is from another source, but unfortunatley, the attributions are not there. My guess is that it is from the Wall Street Journal, but I am not sure.
The effect of potential vote stealing on the outcome of the election was not the only historical argument cut short by Kennedy's assassination.
Kennedy's edge in the nationwide popular vote was the equivalent of less than one vote per precinct. The Associated Press reported that Kennedy's plurality was just 112,827 votes nationwide, a margin of 49.7% to 49.5%. But was Kennedy, like George W. Bush, actually a "minority president," elected without a popular-vote plurality?
It's uncertain because in Alabama, JFK's name didn't actually appear on the ballot. Voters were asked to choose between Nixon and a slate of "unpledged Democrat electors." A statewide primary had chosen five Democratic electors who were "loyalists" pledged to JFK six who were free to vote for anyone.
The Democratic slate defeated Nixon, 324,050 votes to 237,981. In the end, the six unpledged electors voted for Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia, a leading Dixiecrat, and the other five stuck with their pledge to Kennedy. When the Associated Press at the time counted up the popular vote from all 50 states it listed all the Democratic votes, pledged and unpledged, in the Kennedy column. Over the years other counts have routinely assigned all of Alabama's votes to Kennedy.
But scholars say that isn't accurate. "Not all the voters who chose those electors were for Kennedy--anything but," says historian Albert Southwick. Humphrey Taylor, the current chairman of the polling firm Louis Harris & Associates (which worked for Kennedy in 1960), acknowledges that in Alabama "much of the popular vote . . . that is credited to Kennedy's line to give him a small plurality nationally" is dubious. "Richard Nixon seems to have carried the popular vote narrowly, while Kennedy won in the Electoral College," he concludes.
Congressional Quarterly, the respected nonpartisan chronicler of Washington politics, spent some effort in the 1960s to come up with a fair way of counting Alabama's votes. Reporter Neil Pierce took the highest vote cast for any of the 11 Democratic electors in Alabama--324,050--and divided it proportionately between Kennedy and the unpledged electors who ended up voting for Harry Byrd.
Using that method, Kennedy was given credit for 5/11ths of the Democratic total, or 147,295 votes. Nixon's total in Alabama of 237,981 remained the same. The remaining 176,755 votes were counted as being for the unpledged electors.
With these new totals for Alabama factored in with the vote counts for the other 49 states, Nixon has a 58,181-vote plurality, edging out Kennedy 34,108,157 votes to 34,049,976. Using that calculation the 1960 election was even closer than we thought.
There was also a question over vote totals in some states, Texas was one of them, that could have easily changed in favor of Richard Nixon. But Richard Nixon gracefully accepted the reported totals as true.
So, if this is true, I wonder how many Democrats (or Republicans) would argue that President Kennedy stole the election.
The fact is that our Presidential election is based on electors, not the popular vote. If the election was for popular vote, it is quite clear that the candidates would campaign quite differently.
For example, in 2000, there was very little campaigning in Texas. It was quite clear that Bush would win the state even without spending campaign funds in Texas and it obviously would have been futile for Gore to campaign in Texas.
If the popular vote was what mattered, both candidates would have campaigned differently. Both would have spent
The October 25 to October 28, 1960 imprisonment was in the Reidsville State Prison in Georgia.
Jail is where
suspected criminals go.
Prison is where convicted criminals go.
That is close, but not entirely correct. In many states, possibly all states, convictions of some crimes can lead to jail sentences, but not prison sentences.
For example, in Texas a Class A Misdemeanor can land you in a county jail for up to a year.
But you cannot go to prison for a Class A Misdemeanor. For a prison sentence, you would have to be convicted of a felony, not a misdemeanor.
It was for a part time job while I was working on my BS.
Well, I didn't actually say "part time", but I figured that should have been intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
I also dispute your "employment of no consequence" remark. I've known many people who worked at minor jobs while pursuring their education. In general, I thought more of them than those who never needed such jobs.
For what it's worth, as an undergraduate, I worked as a waiter, bus driver, mechanic, and gas station attendant during school and did farm/ranch work during the summers.
I take it you didn't do anything as an undergraduate?
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I had some of that. I have a radio box on top of a grain elevator. When it gets cold enough, the radios quit working until I go up and reset them after it warms up.
When I was a kid, we stacked bales of hay on the north side of the house through the winter.
I'd work for sex, but they insist on paying cash instead.
But I would never work for SCO.
I don't think that tcp would be suitable for such communications.
I'd hate to have ping times measured in years, decades, centuries, or even longer.
Or to have to wait that long for an ack.
Actually, IBM is suing SCO. They have a countersuit that alleges Lanhorn Act violations and patent violations.
Actually, I think it is elephant soccer, not polo.
But the elephant soccer is in Thailand. At least, some elephant soccer is played in Thailand.
There was an article about this a few years ago in a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
A google search for elephant soccer also produces some hits.
For example, from The Surin elephant roundup:
It would be funny if they terminated someone's license for running Caldera Linux.
I wonder if they claim that Caldera Linux infringes.
Sometimes the accents can be to our advantage.
There was a story in one of the Houston papers (when Houston had both the Post and the Chronicle) about Texas and New York lawyers.
It seems that the New York lawyers sometimes interpret a Texas drawl as a mark of being a bit slow. This led to occasional underestimations of the skill of the Texas lawyers.
The result is that the Texas lawyers would sometimes get minor provisions put into a contract because the New York lawyers didn't perceive the threat and would overlook their importance.
Under some circumstances, the provision became turned out to be a major advantage to the Texas company.
Back in the late 70's, my insurance ran about $25 per 6 months.
Then I moved to Houston and it shot up quite a bit over the next two years.
Now, I'm not in Houston any more, but the insurance didn't decrease hardly at all.
Neural networks are relatively simplistic models. A single neuron in a neural network is inherentlyh linear -- it determines the classification of an item based on which side of a dividing line the item is on. By adding neurons and layers of neurons, we can make the shapes of the classification of data nonlinear.
The learning mechanism of a neural network doesn't mimic the real neurons much at all. In fact, once trained, a particular input to a neural network will return the exact same output. A real neuron is not going to be as predictable. For that matter, in real neurons, the firing of a synapse in the presence of an impulse is a question of probability.
That is largely true. Synapses use chemical messengers to transfer the signal from axons to dendrites.
When the pre-synaptic bouton is excited, it releases a packet of neurotransmitters into the synaptic cleft, a small gap between the membranes of the two neurons at the synapse. The neurotransmitters diffuse quickly across the cleft and some will bind to receptors on the post-synaptic terminal. This binding causes certain tiny pores to open which then admit a number of ions into the neuron and results in the build up the charge.
Note that different synapses use different neurotransmitters and the dynamics behave somewhat differently depending on the neurotransmitter used. Thus, it is not enough to know which neurons are connected to which via the synapses, but one would also have to know which types of synapses are present.
Inside of the dendritic membrane on the post-synaptic side, there is also a thickening called the post-synaptic density. Modifications in this area may also have some effect in modulating the nature of the signal.
Also, some synapses are excitatory and some are inhibitory. The inhibitory synapses are typically located close to the cell body or soma and can copletely block the neuron from signalling.
The signal can also depend on where the synapses are located. The closer to the soma, the stronger the effect, in general. There are even some types of neurons that may synapse on the axon in some instances. When that happens, the synapses are very close to or on the axonal hillock where the axom emerges from the soma.
The axonal hillock seems to be the part of the cell that allows the signal to propagate down the axon or that does not allow that propagation.
There is another kind of synapse called a gap junction. Unlike synapses, gap junctions transmit the signal very quickly from one neuron to another. However, gap junctions are not all that common.
Forget that.
Everyone who bought one of those needs to file a criminal complaint with the Attorney General of their state for consumer fraud.
If they get enough of those, they will deal with them.
Did you tell him the lottery ticket is a better gamble than the chocolate bar?
It may still be a pretty good deal.
... .
The real question is not the numerical amount of the winnings compared to the bet, but the value of the money in what you can do with it.
For example, assume the ticket costs $1 and the payout to a single winner is $25,000,000.
What is the real value of that $1 to you? Probably not a whole lot. It's not even a hamburger. Maybe a small coke.
That $1 is just not going to make much difference in your life.
How about $25,000,000? That can make a huge difference in your life. Even adjusting for present value and taking out taxes, you can probably still retire, open your own medium size business, pay off your bookie,
So the real value of $25,000,000 in terms of what it can potentially do for you may be much more than the strict odds on the gamble.
But considering how most people who win seem to blow the money, the value to them may be much less than would be expected.
I used to used my own date routines on the old PDP-11 and Vax computers. It stored the date in a 32 bit integer as the number of days since and including March 2, 1836 That is, March 2, 1836 was day 1, March 3, 1836 was day 2, ... .
March 2, 1836 was the date that the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed in Washington-on-the-Brazos.
At that time, the Alamo was under siege by Santa Anna's troops. It fell four days later on March 6, 1836.
Then, it appears to be permissible for the state legislature to appoint the electors. But note that it states that the legislature directs the manner in which they are selected, not the selection itself.
I did a quick web search and found this web site that provides a table of how the electors are chosen in the various states: How States and Parties Choose Electors. Just click on the table if you have javascript enabled on your browser.
From the table, it appears that only Wisconsin leaves the selection of electors up to the "Legislators & candidates". And the Democratic Party electors in California are chosen by Democrats running in the U.S. House and Senate races to choose the electors.
The electors in most states are chosen by the party's state convention or by the party.
The table seems to be from a 1983 publication. There has undoubtedly been some changes since then.
A little more searching finds this more up to date web page: Which electors are bound?. According to it, states (and DC) binding electors to vote for their pledged candidates are Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, DC, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. So, 26 states and the District of Columbia bind their electors.
But note that it also says:
The legislatures may set rules on the who may serve as an elector, but as far as I know, none choose the electors. If a state passed a law allowing the legislature to choose the electors, I expect that it would be quickly struck down by the Supreme Court.
Also, not all states have such laws requiring electors to vote for their candidate. I think that less than half the states require the electors to vote for their party's nomination. Electors who do not vote for their party's candidate are known as "faithless electors".
In 2000, there was concern by some Republicans that the Democrats might convince enough Republican electors to vote for Gore instead of Bush that Gore could have won the election.
For what it's worth, one of the Democratic electors in 2000 abstained from casting an electoral vote.
One of the most interesting was in 1972. One elector could not bring himself to vote for Richard Nixon. Instead, he went outside of the Republican party to cast his vote for the Libertarian candidates for President and Vice President. The Libertarian Vice President candidate was a woman. As a result, she was the first woman to ever receive a vote in the electoral college.
There is some serious question over whether President Kennedy won the popular vote in 1960.
The technique used to decide who got the popular vote quite probably awarded votes to President Kennedy that he did not, in fact, get.
The following is from another source, but unfortunatley, the attributions are not there. My guess is that it is from the Wall Street Journal, but I am not sure.
There was also a question over vote totals in some states, Texas was one of them, that could have easily changed in favor of Richard Nixon. But Richard Nixon gracefully accepted the reported totals as true.
So, if this is true, I wonder how many Democrats (or Republicans) would argue that President Kennedy stole the election.
The fact is that our Presidential election is based on electors, not the popular vote. If the election was for popular vote, it is quite clear that the candidates would campaign quite differently.
For example, in 2000, there was very little campaigning in Texas. It was quite clear that Bush would win the state even without spending campaign funds in Texas and it obviously would have been futile for Gore to campaign in Texas.
If the popular vote was what mattered, both candidates would have campaigned differently. Both would have spent
I don't believe that anyone here has claimed the Birmingham jail and the Reidsville State Prison are the same thing.
The October 25 to October 28, 1960 imprisonment was in the Reidsville State Prison in Georgia.
That is close, but not entirely correct. In many states, possibly all states, convictions of some crimes can lead to jail sentences, but not prison sentences.
For example, in Texas a Class A Misdemeanor can land you in a county jail for up to a year.
But you cannot go to prison for a Class A Misdemeanor. For a prison sentence, you would have to be convicted of a felony, not a misdemeanor.
jails != prisons
The October 25 to October 28, 1960 imprisonment was in the Reidsville State Prison in Georgia, not a jail.
Never mind. He did do a few days in prison from October 25 to October 28, 1960.
Were there any others?
What prison did Martin Luther King do time in? Of which crime was he convicted?
He was arrested twice, I think, because of protests, but he was released. I don't know whether he was held overnight or released the same day.
But to the best of my knowledge, he was never even convicted of anything.
So do you have some references that list his convictions and prison sentences including the prisons he did time in and the length of his sentences?
There has been a suggestion that RBC made the investment on behalf of a client who wishes to remain anonymous.
There's no telling if that is, in fact, true.
It was for a part time job while I was working on my BS.
Well, I didn't actually say "part time", but I figured that should have been intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
I also dispute your "employment of no consequence" remark. I've known many people who worked at minor jobs while pursuring their education. In general, I thought more of them than those who never needed such jobs.
For what it's worth, as an undergraduate, I worked as a waiter, bus driver, mechanic, and gas station attendant during school and did farm/ranch work during the summers.
I take it you didn't do anything as an undergraduate?
When I was an undergraduate, an acquaintance of mine was manager of a convenience store.
One day he mentioned that he was short of workers. I told him I'd like to apply for a job there.
He said to not bother. It turned out that they had changed polygraph examiners about six months earlier and that since then not one person had passed.
That was why they were short on personnel.