AdamSmith
-
Posts
18,271 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
320
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Posts posted by AdamSmith
-
-
38 minutes ago, stevenkesslar said:
I actually found it rather charming.
Let me slip into something more comfortable. We can be like two queens having a nice long chat.
Occurs that one would like to resurrect the first Elizabeth, and bring her iron fist over here as Executive to straighten out our own many messes right now.
-
2 hours ago, stevenkesslar said:
@AdamSmith noted in a different thread that history has a way of turning on itself, in response to my point about 2004 and the "Swiftboating" of John Kerry.
I'm continuing this here, since I didn't realize there was a thread on this subject.
Here's another weird turn of history:
Evidence piles up that the phony Atlantic story about Trump and troops was a slime job to boost Biden
It's a thoughtful enough article if you care to read the whole thing. Maybe about 20 % of it reiterates that that this obviously can't be true, because people around President Toxic say it's not true.The other 80 % is about how this is all part of a .......................................... wait for it ......................................................................... vast left-wing conspiracy.
Who'd a thunk that if we waited a generation, right wing rags like American Spectator would be repurposed as the new and conservative Hillary Clinton?
This is a perfect metaphor for Trumpism. Because the argument collapses on itself. It's fine to argue that The Atlantic is one of the vague dark forces out there. But they might want to at least mention that three other major media outlets have confirmed the general thrust of the story.
And, yeah, granted. Two of the other three are no doubt part of the vast left wing conspiracy. So why bother with those facts?
But who'd a thunk that, nowadays, even Fox News is part of the vast left wing conspiracy?
Bizarro, world very strange. & accurate.
Yes .
-
3 hours ago, stevenkesslar said:
I assume you mean distance.
Completely off topic, when I read "disremove" my mind immediately flashed to my favorite scene in The Fighter. Leo and Bale deserved their Oscars just for this scene.
""I've been doing this over 15 years. She comes in, disrespects me."
"She don't mean no disrespect."
Anyway, I agree. I don't mean history no disrespect, either.
I slipped into Elizabethan English. Please forgive.
-
History has a way of turning on itself, if we have a little patience, and some disremove until it does.
-
The site function is again fucked up.
Or it is Putin.
@stevenkesslar
his GOTV point cannot be too much emphasized. In the two-week run up to both of Obama’s wins, my house here in N.C. was assuaded with (very welcomed) in-person stop-bys from these carloads of elderly black ladies emphasizing we must vote for BO.
By contrast, late in Hillary’s campaign, I got just a 2-minute in-person visit from this campaign person (very beautiful, and beautifully dressed, I think Vietnamese) kid, simply asking, Are you going to vote for Hillary?’
-
Good re-repeat, here again, if it interests.
-
Maybe if you also use of those big Plexiglass barriers that the checkout cashiers have...
-
On 9/2/2020 at 7:49 PM, Latbear4blk said:
I was already scared even before listening to it.
There are a lot more of these if you Google for them.
- Latbear4blk and gaothanear
-
2
-
-
On 9/1/2020 at 1:21 PM, Latbear4blk said:
Can you share who wrote that? I am not going back over there, it is against my religion.
-
Titles The Clubfoot Race Melcene First Appearance The Sorceress of Darshiva Senji is an Alchemist and Sorcerer who Beldin, Belgarath and Garion meet in Melcene during Sorceress of Darshiva after they followed Zandramas' trail there. Senji is a senior member of the faculty of the College of Applied Alchemy at the University of Melcena. He is referred to as 'the Clubfoot' by Cyradis and is around 3900 years old. He leads the sorcerers to a museum where the Sardion once rested and also gives Belgarath an unmutilated copy of the Ashabine Oracles.
He discovered the Gift of 'the Will and the Word' by accident in the 15th century when he turned lead into gold by shouting at it; because the Melcenes did not believe him, they attempted to prove it by trying to pushing him out the window (trying to determine if (A) he was in fact unkillable, (B) what means he would take to save his life while plummeting toward the paved courtyard, and (C) if it might be possible to discover the secret of flight by giving him no other alternative. Quoted from page 139 of "Sorceress of Darshiva"). While they were carrying out this method, he translocated the assassin high above the Melcene harbour (thus ruining the fishing nets of a local fisherman). Outraged by this affair, he implemented a widespread plague of constipation, releasing his victims only after a personal appeal from the Melcene Emperor himself. After this they accepted his extraordinary gift and left him to himself. Even though he has this gift, his abilities are weak at best, and he chooses to turn it to Alchemy.
Senji has a rusty-sounding voice and is described as a grubby little man. He was bald and smelly.
It is heavily implied that Senji was going to be a follower of Eriond.
-
One knows most of them (and as noted before one may have indulged in a little canoodling around
). Wonderful people all
-
-
-
39 minutes ago, adamdub said:
Oh! This brings me back I was obsessed with these books as a kid and read them cover to cover until I wore out the spines. I really loved the whole universe this created, down to the different religions, languages, cultures, and it just felt very lived in.
Very good to hear. Have likewise read & reread them obsessively.
-
25 minutes ago, Britnnyc said:
Thanks!
Sort of next-gen version of the same thing. Very enjoyable likewise.
-
On 8/31/2020 at 4:25 AM, AdamSmith said:
The greatest blindness is to be too serious about very grave things.
‘The situation is fatal, but not serious.’
Can’t quite recall who first said this.
-
7 hours ago, Britnnyc said:
The Lord of the Rings. Reading now. Very comforting.
See also:
-
On 8/29/2020 at 7:26 PM, AdamSmith said:
The greatest blindness is to be too serious about very grave things.
-
Childhood’s End
Arthur C. Clarke
Chapter 18 Summary
Jeffrey Greggson begins to have dreams six weeks after the tsunami. George wakes up in the middle of the night and sees that Jean is not in bed. He finds her in Jeff’s room, saying that she awakened knowing that Jeff needed her. Jeff describes his dreams, which are not terrifying. He sees a place with a blue sun and tall mountains that are not volcanoes but still are on fire with blue flames.
Karellen and Rashaverak discuss Jeff’s dreams, which they have been observing. They think they know what planet he is seeing. They do not dare question Jeff yet, nor will they interfere in any way. Jeff continues having dreams, but he is fine when he is awake. He continues to dream about other places. He is no longer lonely in his dreams, nor is he afraid. It was only on that first night that he had subconsciously called out to his mother. Karellen and Rashaverak begin to have trouble identifying the planets in Jeff’s dreams, but they know he is going further into the center of the galaxy. Soon they see that he has left the galaxy altogether.
George meets with Rashaverak at his own request. They speak of their first meeting at Rupert Boyce’s party. When Rashaverak asks George why he requested this interview, George tells him that he thinks he already knows. Rashaverak agrees, but wants to hear it from George, stating that the Overlords do not know everything. This surprises George, who thought the aliens were almost omniscient. George begins by speaking of Jeff’s visit to the island psychologist. George never believed that these dreams were just the product of a child’s vivid imagination. He knew there was a rational explanation for it. Rashaverak says that it all started at Rupert’s party, when Jean made contact with her yet to be conceived...
(The entire section is 469 words.)
Unlock This Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial to unlock this Childhood's Endstudy guide and get instant access to the following:
- Summary
- Chapter Summaries
- Themes
- Characters
- Critical Essays
- Analysis
- 1 Homework Help Question with Expert Answers
You'll also get access to more than 30,000 additional guides and 300,000 Homework Help questions answered by our experts.
https://www.enotes.com/topics/childhoods-end-arthur-c-clarke/chapter-summaries/chapter-18-summary
-
Seven Bridges of Königsberg
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_Königsberg
Map of Königsberg in Euler's time showing the actual layout of the seven bridges, highlighting the river Pregel and the bridgesThe Seven Bridges of Königsberg is a historically notable problem in mathematics. Its negative resolution by Leonhard Euler in 1736[1] laid the foundations of graph theoryand prefigured the idea of topology.[2]
The city of Königsberg in Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) was set on both sides of the Pregel River, and included two large islands—Kneiphof and Lomse—which were connected to each other, or to the two mainland portions of the city, by seven bridges. The problem was to devise a walk through the city that would cross each of those bridges once and only once.
By way of specifying the logical task unambiguously, solutions involving either
- reaching an island or mainland bank other than via one of the bridges, or
- accessing any bridge without crossing to its other end
are explicitly unacceptable.
Euler proved that the problem has no solution. The difficulty he faced was the development of a suitable technique of analysis, and of subsequent tests that established this assertion with mathematical rigor.
Euler's analysis
First, Euler pointed out that the choice of route inside each land mass is irrelevant. The only important feature of a route is the sequence of bridges crossed. This allowed him to reformulate the problem in abstract terms (laying the foundations of graph theory), eliminating all features except the list of land masses and the bridges connecting them. In modern terms, one replaces each land mass with an abstract "vertex" or node, and each bridge with an abstract connection, an "edge", which only serves to record which pair of vertices (land masses) is connected by that bridge. The resulting mathematical structure is called a graph.
→ 
→ 
Since only the connection information is relevant, the shape of pictorial representations of a graph may be distorted in any way, without changing the graph itself. Only the existence (or absence) of an edge between each pair of nodes is significant. For example, it does not matter whether the edges drawn are straight or curved, or whether one node is to the left or right of another.
Next, Euler observed that (except at the endpoints of the walk), whenever one enters a vertex by a bridge, one leaves the vertex by a bridge. In other words, during any walk in the graph, the number of times one enters a non-terminal vertex equals the number of times one leaves it. Now, if every bridge has been traversed exactly once, it follows that, for each land mass (except for the ones chosen for the start and finish), the number of bridges touching that land mass must be even (half of them, in the particular traversal, will be traversed "toward" the landmass; the other half, "away" from it). However, all four of the land masses in the original problem are touched by an odd number of bridges (one is touched by 5 bridges, and each of the other three is touched by 3). Since, at most, two land masses can serve as the endpoints of a walk, the proposition of a walk traversing each bridge once leads to a contradiction.
In modern language, Euler shows that the possibility of a walk through a graph, traversing each edge exactly once, depends on the degrees of the nodes. The degree of a node is the number of edges touching it. Euler's argument shows that a necessary condition for the walk of the desired form is that the graph be connected and have exactly zero or two nodes of odd degree. This condition turns out also to be sufficient—a result stated by Euler and later proved by Carl Hierholzer. Such a walk is now called an Eulerian path or Euler walk in his honor. Further, if there are nodes of odd degree, then any Eulerian path will start at one of them and end at the other. Since the graph corresponding to historical Königsberg has four nodes of odd degree, it cannot have an Eulerian path.
An alternative form of the problem asks for a path that traverses all bridges and also has the same starting and ending point. Such a walk is called an Eulerian circuit or an Euler tour. Such a circuit exists if, and only if, the graph is connected, and there are no nodes of odd degree at all. All Eulerian circuits are also Eulerian paths, but not all Eulerian paths are Eulerian circuits.
Euler's work was presented to the St. Petersburg Academy on 26 August 1735, and published as Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinentis (The solution of a problem relating to the geometry of position) in the journal Commentarii academiae scientiarum Petropolitanae in 1741.[3] It is available in English in The World of Mathematics.
Significance in the history and philosophy of mathematicsPresent state of the bridgesSee alsoReferencesExternal links -
Heh heh heh. This is how to do politics.
Kennedy scrambles to close gap in Massachusetts
Trailing in the polls, the young congressman needs to turn things around quickly in his primary bid against Sen. Ed Markey.
Rep. Joe Kennedy's focus in the final days of the race will be to turn out a diverse coalition of voters who will vote in person. | Jessica Bradley/WPRI-TV via AP
08/30/2020 06:44 AM EDT
BOSTON — Just two years ago, Joe Kennedy’s star was so bright that he was asked to deliver the Democratic Party’s response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech. Now, if he can’t turn things around before Tuesday’s Massachusetts Senate primary, he’ll be out of politics.
A handful of recent polls show the 39-year-old congressman trailing incumbent Sen. Ed Markey — the septuagenarian incumbent whose campaign is improbably powered by younger progressive voters. Among voters under the age of 35, one of those polls reports, Markey is leading Kennedy by an almost 2-to-1 margin.
Advertisement
"The AOC, Sunrise Movement, Justice Democrats embrace of Ed Markey to me is twofold. That is what has allowed this remarkable makeover of Ed Markey to combat the fact he's 74 years old and been in Congress 44 years. The way they did that was to make him the darling of the climate change warriors, and instrumental to that is [New York Rep.] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez," said Mary Anne Marsh, a Boston-based Democratic consultant who is neutral in the race but whose firm works for the Kennedy campaign. "Without her, I think it would've been a much harder effort to make him into the Ed Markey people see in this race, which is very different from the Ed Markey people in Massachusetts have seen in 44 years."...
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/30/joe-kennedy-massachusetts-senate-primary-404936
-
https://books.google.com/books/about/Most_of_S_J_Perelman.html?id=tRZ8pwAACAAJ&source=kp_book_description
-
The pianoforte
in The Beer Bar
Posted
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6caJjZstNoY