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Chicken or the egg Jay? "Why do those fucking numbnut loser pussies hate us so much?"

From the Seattle Times (emphasis mine) ... "Both parties have been unhappy with Reed at points in the recount. At different times, each wanted the Secretary of State's Office to take a more forceful role in directing how county officials should conduct the recounts. Democrats filed a lawsuit against Reed in the state Supreme Court. They wanted to force him to issue statewide standards for reviewing signatures on absentee ballots, for governing election observers and for requiring reconsideration of all ballots rejected in earlier counts. In that case, Reed's attorneys sat with lawyers for Rossi and the Republican Party who had joined the case on Reed's side. They won, with the court unanimously rejecting the Democratic request. Less than two weeks later, the stage was shuffled, and Reed's attorneys sat with the Democrats. They argued against a Republican request that King County be prohibited from reconsidering more than 700 ballots that officials said had been erroneously rejected. Again, the court was unanimous, ruling this time against the Republicans." ... When both parties get pissed off it is, I think, the sign of a fair arbiter. The fact that the courts unanimously agreed with him in both cases also indicates that he's following the law. Unless, of course, it was those damn activist judges,...well except for the first time when they agreed with the Republicans

If you're using a dynamic rope, then you won't need a screamer attached to your belay device.

Sacrifice by Flipper Can you hear the war cry? It's time to enlist. The people speak as one. the cattle, the crowd. Those too afraid to live demand a sacrifice. They demand a sacrifice of your life Can you smell their stinking breath. Listen to them. Wheezing and gasping and chanting their slogans. It's a gravediggers song. Praising god and state. So the nation will live. So the people will remain as cattle. They demand a sacrifice They demand a sacrifice of your life Can't you smell the fresh blood, streaming into the soil. As our patriots, fathers, mothers and lovers admire the military style. Crying tears of pride For the sons and lovers For all the fools slaughtered For the maimed, the dying And the dead. They demand a sacrifice. They demand a sacrifice of your life.

The thing about fixing cars using the manual is that: you can do it, but it's a steep learning curve. The first time you take that stuff apart on a car it can be pretty confusing, but you'll learn a lot about that area of the engine. So, if you ever have to do that exact repair again, it's easier. But usually you don't have to fix the exact same thing twice. Doh! (Brake components are complicated! Make sure you leave one intact while fixing the other so you have a model of how to put it back together.) When you learn more about your particular engine (and in fixing engines in general) it gets exponenentially easier. But it's still usually a tiring, dirty, PiTA job that will take two to ten times as long for you to do than the "professionals". It's nice to be self-sufficient, but sometimes it's just more efficient to pay through the nose.

If my son died over there, I'd be thinking of him. I wouldn't be giving a shit about whether his civillian boss's signature is genuine or not. I'd be focusing on why/how he died. Form letter apology from someone who didn't know him from Adam would be nice, but it's not like it'd turn me for or against the war. That is, in the list of Rumsfeld's failings, non-signatures is not high on the list. Sure it's a shitty thing to do, but using kids for cheap cannon fodder in a war of choice while the big money gets spent on unrealistic anti-missle technology, for example, would seem like a more relevant issue to focus on.

Does anyone really care whether or not the Sec of Defense uses his actual hand to sign a fuckin' form letter? Is this "issue" just a smokescreen non-issue to get all the knee-jerkers among the left to embarrass themselves and us? Or perhaps this is just an attention diverter (a la Kerik's nanny) to misdirect people away from the real problem (Iraq = quagmire)?

Special Ed's got one I think.

The "let's have sex", predatory approach seems to be not working (this probably only works for individuals with specific qualities), so maybe you ougta try just building up your "base". Don't size up every woman for sex before you even meet them. Instead of limiting yourself to women who are sexaully appealling to you, just make friends with any women who are friendly to you. If someone seems unfriendly, then leave them alone. You don't need the abuse. Soon, you'll know lots of women and once in a while some may be romantically interested. You'll probably even have some busybodies fixing you up with their friends. This is a long-term approach and requires patience and willpower. Stop reading porno, try to shove that lust somewhere else, and just meet people rather than potential sex-partners. When it finally rains, it will probably pour.

Housewife 1: Ooooh look! Your husband's coming up the walk with a beautiful bouquet of flowers! Housewife 2: Oh that's fucking lovely! Now I'm gonna have my legs spread all weekend. Housewife 3: What's the matter? Don't you have a vase?

Lots o' good readin'!

Maybe one factor in the rising claims equation is because there is more negligence? Also could be that the "unfailing doctor" mystique is fading and people are more likely to file a claim when medical injury occurs? I believe there are studies that show that in states with damage caps malpractice insurance premiums tend to be lower AND rate of claims to be higher! Caps on damage seem to be the right thing in terms of reducing premiums, but wrong in terms of weakening the deterrent for negligence. Any limit on tort liability should be accompanied by some sort of additional deterrents on negligence. see this link if you're interested

So are you saying that the first sentence of my quote is an innaccurate description of Bush's plan?

"If Mr. Bush were to say in plain English that his plan to solve our fiscal problems is to borrow trillions, put the money into stocks and hope for the best, everyone would denounce that plan as the height of irresponsibility. The fact that this plan has an elaborate disguise, one that would add considerably to its costs, makes it worse." link

CONSUMER ALERT!!! I bought a "Beers O' the World" mystery mix of beers at Trader Joe's yesterday. On the surface it appears to be a good deal, 10$ for twelve mystery beers, and it's not like Trader Joe's stocks too much Black Label or Pabst. So anyway, 5 beers from US, 7 from non-US, not bad. But the beers I got Mandarin Orange Hefeweisen P U! Oregon Honeybeer puke! "Coastal Light" WTF! the label looks like it's the housebrand beer at Super-8 motels Some really stinky Czech beer Some supersweet Widmer stout (puke) I got taken. Just a heads up.

I got a 25" TV I'd love to give away (save me the 15$ dump fee). You want it? One catch, the green part of the tube frizzed out so there's no green tone. But once you get adjusted to the purple world it's no big deal. Really. Whattaya expect for nothing? So anyway, if you want it let me know soon (Seattle). Otherwise I'll be heading to the dump this weekend. Got a POS VCR that's gonna be dumped too.

Your concept is correct, it's just not anything specifically Bayesian. The election is a tie. You could count and recount and recount and keep getting different answers. The only thing to do is follow established procedure, and see who wins that way. The option for a recount is established procedure. Stop whining you anti-recounters. Christine Gregoire could save somebody a bunch of money by quitting. Just the same as George Bush could save a lot of people from sorrow by abandoning his post (again) and hiding somewhere.

Bayesian statistics huh. Nice big word Dru. Too bad you used it incorrectly.

Try to avoid mucking up clips on a sport route with webbing. How would you like it if you were pumped and nearing salvation of the bolt only to find that it's all jammed up with someone's bail webbing? Use a biner or Toast's solution. One thing about lowering (besides Alpinfox's very good advice about don't do it through webbing), make damn sure that you have enough rope. Just to safeguard in situations where this is not always perfectly clear, have your belayer/lowerer tie in to the rope.

There's some data on vote counting in this article Wolter K, Jergovic D, Moore W, et al. Reliability of the uncertified ballots in the 2000 presidential election in Florida AMERICAN STATISTICIAN 57 (1): 1-14 FEB 2003 One tidbit: out of 2357091 ballots investigated that were counted by optical scanning, 7202 were judged by the machine to have no mark. Of these, 2603 (0.11 % of the original total) were judged by human judges to have had a vote marked in. A 99% confidence interval for percentage of votes missed by optical scan is 0.105% to 0.116%. To put it another way, that's 105 to 116 votes missed for every 100,000 votes cast via optical scan machines (I focus on optical scan ballots here, as that is how it works where I vote. Some machines had worse accuracy.) Extrapoloating to all of WA state, that's more than 3000 votes just plain missed. This says nothing of other types of mistakes that can happen (like those 720 uncounted ballots "found" by King County election officials during the recount). Bad news is previous studies seem to show hand counts even less accurate. See this paper. So, no solution there. Once a vote is this close, with this many votes, the final result is determined by random chance. The "choice of the voters", in terms of which candidate is above the magic 50% line, is impossible to determine. What I think would be great is if after a hand recount it was determined that there were enough votes "found" that put Gregoire ahead. But then Rossi ends up winning because Gregoire's office missed the deadline to submit the findings!

I heard on the radio (this spouted by the DNC guy in WA [truth in advertising]) that there was a Cal Tech study done showing that the error rate of these voting machines is more than 1%. So, yes, 42 out of 2.8 million (0.00004%) is a tie. A runoff election would be interesting and costly. What I think they ought to do is hold a lottery, and pick one lucky WA resident who gets to decide who the governor is. PLUS, just to make it like a real lottery (big money winner), that person would have no legal restrictions upon taking money from interest groups. Just think how exciting that would be! Way better than basically giving the benefit of the doubt to one candidate because of a flip of the coin which is what is going to happen.

1. Longer lines at the Vegas drive-thru wedding chapels. 2. Higher prices for divorce and pre-nup attorneys due to increased demand. 3. Wedding rings more expensive. 4. Less "available" guys for guys like ConradCA. 5. More chance that the kid you put up for adoption (because you're too much of a deadbeat to take on the responsibility) might get adopted by a homosexual couple. 6. Might have to change a lot of names in your address book. 7. More weddings to attend and gifts to buy. 8. more?

Me? Why do you think? I did get to spend a lovely sunny couple of hours at a nice playground. Enough of this chatter, back to the subject at hand: