Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, July 29, 2024
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58 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Donald Trump endorses all three major Republican candidates for Missouri governor
And whoever wins, he will take credit for the victory.
Rupert Murdoch wants to revoke his family’s irrevocable trust. Please pass the popcorn.
@OzarkHillbilly:
The MAGAs aren’t happy with Blake Masters.
@CSK: I’m curious as to what prompted your remark about Masters?
@MarkedMan: When I saw the comment, I looked him up. Apparently, he has recanted “stolen election.”
ETA: I didn’t see any links to MAGAt anger, only that Trump had warned him that recanting was a loser move.
Trump Administration was warned sanctions on Venezuela could fuel migration
@just nutha:
I got the info about MAGA anger at Masters from Raw Story. It could be exaggerated.
This is concerning – you all may be having fun joking about couches and dolphins, but J D Vance is also a serious menace. And note:
A) Trump is easy to play, manipulate.
B) There is a serious likelihood of his VP becoming POTUS before 2028.
Vance, backed by Peter Thiel, is into some scary stuff – like Project 2025 on steroids.
“TheNewRepublic”
snip
snip
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I see nominally electing Trump puts Vance de facto and likely eventually de jure in the oval office.
I’ve been wondering if there’s going to be news story regarding about Kamala’s extraordinary consolidation of the Democratic party and what role she may have played and how it all came together. I’m on board with it as a liberal, but I was also on the fence, glass half full Biden could and should still do it as I admire him, bit glass half empty that yeah, we all saw it and it just doesn’t seem like he can do the job capable for another 4 years. But the interesting question to me is the who what where and how did this all come together in this almost perfect, dream like scenario where Kamala f’ing rocks all of sudden – and I’m all hear for her in that regard – but how much of role did she really play in the all aligning up? How much was just happenstance, like perfect moment, perfect person, in the most unlikely of circumstances. Like a literal “person chosen out of history” or some such lofty notion. I for one things it’s a combination of person place and just the craziest of timing and the craziest of political machinations that all combined to make this moment happen. And hey, we still don’t know how she’ll continue to do and if she’ll even win, fingers crossed, but it’s just one if the most amazing political news stories in terms of how this is developing. And I look forward to reporting on how this all actually happened, and what role Kamala had in it.
OMG!!1!! New Jersey is erasing history!!1
And so is Pennsylvania. If they don’t erect a statue to this guy, it means no assassination attempt ever took place.
That’s how US history works, right? Without monuments celebrating treasonous acts and historical figures, there’s no history.
Again, want to see what electoral fraud is like. look at Venezuela.
Although they seemed to have neglected the matter of detailed vote data. Since they knew the result before the campaigns even got started, they should have had it ready. Party dictatorships do get sloppy and complacent (see Mexico 1988).
A few years ago, I had the chance to see, though not meet (Hera be praised), a Venezuelan government official on business. He had more bling on that a jewelry store widow display, and for some reason had an unlit Cuban cigar in one hand. You should have heard him expound on the virtues of actual socialism (aka authoritarian one party rule), while acting the parody of a rich potentate.
I saw this in passing while at a government office on unrelated matters. You could see the officials he was talking with were trying not to laugh or smirk at the little trump.
Something related to @charontwo‘s post that I have thought about quite a bit recently. The tech mindset, evident in some engineers, often computer scientists, makes a lot of assumptions about humans and statistics that should be more heavily scrutinized. Engineering programs should probably devote some required class time to the philosophy of science.
I have thought a lot about RNG. It would be one thing if it was only used for video games, but it is not. It is also used for online gambling. I mostly think about it in terms of poker, because that is the one game that I play.
I have read countless threads about whether online poker rooms are ‘rigged.’ Aside from the instances of real cheating exposed in years past, rigged is the wrong word. Rigged implies a system that favors specific players.
It allows for people to just reply with legitimate arguments about sample size, negative bias, and variance. Or the old saw that poker rooms have a strong incentive to ensure fairness, because they make their money on rake, not who wins and loses.
But there is more to it. Online poker rooms, to their credit, do not use strictly software-based RNG. They use a more expensive, technically advanced, hardware based system. But that does not address every issue, in my opinion.
For one thing, neither pseudo-RNG nor hardware-RNG simulate the physical act of shuffling a deck of cards or rolling two six-sided dice. Rather, the RNG systems target the statistical model that describes the distributions of outcomes for those two physical activities.
This is not necessarily a problem. Arguably, using electronic means of simulation eliminates the possibility of imperfect shuffles and non-perfectly manufactured dice. But on the other hand, it gives a reason why people have a vastly different perception of electronically produced dice rolls or decks of cards.
Moreover, everyone who blindly replies to the rigged question with arguments I mentioned above, seems to ignore that in statistics, how you get to the distribution matters, which requires an analysis of smaller intervals of results.
Meaning, if you only look at final distributions of results without checking to see if the proper number of flopped quads was reached via several hands in a row making that outcome, then that’s not random in any understanding of the word.
Another issue that bothers me is that, from my understanding, the algorithm to shuffle a deck does not simulate a deck that is shuffled then left untouched. For security reasons, the poker rooms are understandably leery of doing that.
To avoid that security risk, each card subsequent to the first, can still be any of the 52 cards in a deck. It then runs a process to determine whether that card has already been dealt. If it has, it restarts the process until it deals a card that has not already been dealt.
Does that matter? Maybe not. But it does require a particular set of philosophical beliefs about human experience, math/statistics, simulation, and computers to be true.
That is one way to explain the Yarvins and Musks of the world. Not only their perspective, but how that perspective can appeal to some individuals who lack sophistication in anything outside of their own understanding.
@charontwo:
Here is a piece on Yarvin by Vox:
“Vox“
@Kurtz:
Flashback to my active interest in gambling days…
Conventional wisdom on the gaming boards I frequented, which included some industry insiders and gaming mathematicians, was that video poker machines (VP) operated on the constant shuffle principle you mention.
VP strategy guides, though, kept on advising on plays according to probability, dependent on the pay table structure. But you saw plenty of stories about hitting jackpots or royals with lines like “Luckily I hit the draw button at the precise millisecond when the next card would be the one I needed!”
I don’t see what else one can do but play the odds on VP. I don’t think anyone’s figured out a way to game the RNG method of physical casino VP machines, nor of online casino VP.
As to actual poker between several human players, that depends on skill as well as odds.
On the attempted assassination of the former president:
I served 24 years in a front line federal law enforcement agency. Quarterly firearms quals were mandatory. I have qualified with the .357 magnum revolver, Beretta and Heckler & Koch .40 pistols, the Remington 870 shotgun, and the M4 rifle, which is basically the full auto AR15. I have fired the AK47 rifle and the MP5 and MP40 submachine guns. Now in retirement, I hold a concealed carry permit, and regularly shoot .40 and 9mm pistols; a .40 carbine (which is sweet) and, of course, our ubiquitous AR15. I qualify annually with the Sheriff’s Department to maintain my LEOSA status.
Just for kicks, I always practice shooting a target holding a hostage. I draw a silhouette of a person just covering the target’s face, with the eye-to-ear portion exposed. I use the pistol at 1.5- 25 yards distance, and the AR and .40 carbine beyond that. I’m going to be blunt and tell you: IT AIN’T F****G EASY SHOOTING A SMALL TARGET AT DISTANCE. Unless one is precision shooting trained and using precision rifle and optics, the odds are very low of hitting a small target point without being off by inches.
Aiming at a target and being inches off aiming point is natural and standard for an average shooter. The odds of being off aiming point and barely grazing the target (an ear, for example), while not impossible, are so low as to be improbable. In other words, the chances of Crooks attempting a head shot and grazing an ear are something a probability and statistics expert would have to determine. The odds of him attempting a center-mass shot and grazing the ear, well… All this is to say, sumpn stinks about the whole thing.
@Kathy:
In the interest of clarity, I only play human v. human poker. I also am not arguing that it is unfair. Only that the interpretation that most online poker players use to defend RNG of any type contains some assumptions that are questionable.
The clicking at the exact moment is based on one particular implementation of hRNG. There are other methods of generating a random seed–the one that comes to mind is lightning strikes.
To be clear, I am a pretty good poker player. Especially live games. I have some skills. And I’m not claiming that online poker is illegitimate in some way. There are some issues I have with it aside from RNG–particularly tracking software. But that isn’t the point of my post.
My argument is that it is different–for better or worse. In fact, I have seen people argue that it is “better” because it avoids imperfect shuffles. I find that claim questionable for other reasons, but I think it is important to note that making that argument undermines the notion that complaints about RNG are somehow misinformed.
One last thing: “playing the odds” assumes that the final distribution is arrived at via a process that is truly random (in the sense of a physical deck of shuffled cards) rather than a process that specifically targets that distribution. Goodhart’s Law seems to apply here.
@DeD:
Absent precision shooting training, would flooding the target area with bullets be any more effective? Say by firing a full automatic gun, and getting in 30 shots in a couple of seconds rather than 8 or ten aimed rounds?
I wouldn’t attempt to calculate odds without knowing the trajectories of all fired shots, plus what else they struck. Also what kind of ammo was used. Some bullets fragment when they hit, some don’t. The former are more apt to create shrapnel if they strike anything other than a person; say a teleprompter, podium, floor…
I’ve seen nothing about that, and don’t even know if law enforcement has determined such things. And I know we’re not living in a CSI ep, where such things can be determined inside a commercial break with magical precision of one part in ten trillion trillion.
I recall reading a few things by Yarvin at the time, and he seemed a feeble outlier. Ahem.
One thing I remember him saying, and I read this as simple posturing, was that the only good thing about democracy was that you got to know ahead of time how many people were going to be in each army when the war broke out.
Now, I’m paraphrasing from memory, so don’t get too caught up in the specifics…
But yes, I read “Hillbilly Elegy” and didn’t think it was junk. However, my assessment of Vance, based on many things, not just the book, is that he is highly predatory. He will go for the jugular, if he gets a chance.
@Kathy:
Any more effective than what? More effective than single-shot aiming? That depends on the goal. Factoring in ability, equipment, distance, and myriad other factors, sure, spraying an area may get you more target hits; but that doesn’t guarantee you’ll hit the target your going for.
And, to be clear: I am not claiming Trump wasn’t shot at; I’m saying the odds of him being grazed on the ear by a rifle-to-target round are low.
Elon Musk calls Harris an ‘extinctionist’
More at the link.
This guy . . . Ah, nevermind. I should not say what I want to say here.
I will point out that one of the top comments on this post says, Harris is an actual communist. We are not dealing with the brightest bulbs here.
@Kurtz:
I’ve some grasp of odds, but get lost in nuances and technicalities.
In VP, payoff depends on the hand one gets and the game one plays. So having, for example, four to a royal flush, you keep that, and the odds the one card you need will turn up is 1 in 47*.
I always saw it more in terms of quantum mechanics: the next card is every remaining card in the deck, until it gets dealt and the wave function collapses into one specific card 😉
*There are better odds of drawing a jacks or better pair, or a flush, or even a straight.
@CSK: My primary point was that highlighting the name and opening a sidebar/search link on my phone provided adequate information for me to approximate your info.
@DeD:
*you’re. I’m an idiot, sometimes.
@DeD:
Of hitting the target.
At that, the assumption is that Convicted Felon was the target. This may be so, but it also might have been an attempted mass shooting. For all that’s been released on the shooter, there seems to be no motive for an assassination of this particular individual.
@Kurtz:
It figures that trying to preserve the environment, so we an still live comfortably on this planet generations from now and still enjoy its natural resources, would be seen as somehow demanding some form of extinction.
Just as favoring paid parental leave, prenatal care, daycare, and a child tax credit is seen as being anti-family for some reason.
I know it’s all about the dog whistles.
@just nutha:
I may have been suffering from an insufficiency of coffee at that point.
@charontwo:
> Like Trump, Vance cares only about obtaining power.
> Like Trump, Vance seems to marginally care about ideas, particularly those ideas that place men at the center of the American political culture and economy.
> Like Trump, he is charismatic to people who are strongly motivated by anger and grievance.
> Unlike Trump, he seems to lack Trump’s ability to walk away from the messes he creates on Aisle 666. Trump does not care, he just moves on to the next occasion to leave a mess.
This morning the barista at my coffee place referred to JD Vance as ‘The Cat Lady Guy.’
Made my day.
Acclaimed Irish novelist Edna O’Brien has died, aged 93. RIP.
@DeD:
The odds of the bullet passing through any particular bullet-sized space from that distance is low, but it’s going to pass through one of them.
The odds of a piece of glass from a shot teleprompter grazing the ear like that is also very low. But the same logic applies — it has to go somewhere, and each point in space is really unlikely.
I’ve seen some pictures claiming to be Trump’s ear after removing the bandage, and… if these photos are real, either that man regrows ears like a lizard can regrow its tail*, or it was the tiniest nick imaginable.
My Ear Truther theory is that Trump cut himself on his cufflink, in a moment of panic. Does he wear cufflinks? I don’t know, but why let that stop anything? Also, he shit himself, but he took that in stride because he always shits himself.
*: was the regrowth helped along with adrenochrome harvested from children? I think the jury is out on that.
I am an unabashed Law & Order junkie. The original series that ran from September, 1990 to May, 2010. I like Law & Order: Criminal Intent also. I have a very limited collection of DVD’s of both and never tire of watching them over and over again. DVD is the extent of my video entertainment at home. No streaming. No over the air TV reception. No CATV or satellite video service.
When I take road trips I try to stay at places that have DirecTV. There are at least three DirecTV channels that broadcast back to back Law & Order episodes on different days. BBC America, Sundance and WE (Women’s Entertainment).
I have noticed that when it comes to content editing the three networks don’t always follow the same rules. Since I have not kept written notes I can’t say which outlet does what however I do know that I have seen an episode where a character will say the word “ni99er” plain as day yet that dialog in the same scene will be deleted on another network. I have even watched a L&O episode where the word “damn” is deleted on one venue yet the same word is spoken on another.
There are also instances of video censorship that I find silly. Like when it is apparent that a male actor is wearing underpants yet his crotch area is blurred out as if he were naked.
I just don’t understand how editor’s decide which words should not be aired.
Just last night I watched as crusty old DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill) related an Irish joke:
“How do you tell the difference between shanty Irish and Lace Curtain Irish?
The Lace Curtain Irish move the dishes before they piss in the sink.”
The word piss was cut from the dialog.
@DeD:
Especially if you’re an untrained 20 year old shaking from the adrenaline surges. I haven’t kept on top of the related news but I saw a while back that the shooter had just scared a cop off the roof by aiming at him prior to the snap shots at Trump.
Trump’s ear looked uninjured at the Turning Point Action’s The believers summit in west palm beach. I’m unable to figure out what part of skin the round hit.
@Kathy: Recoil will bounce the rifle all over causing even more inaccuracy. Just a few MM of movement of the barrel can cause a round to be +10 feet off target. Full auto at targets +150 yards away is basically just suppressive fire. Unless you have a mounted .50 m2 or something similar.
It’s interesting to see on Curtis Yarvin aka “Mencius Moldbug” is getting his 15 minutes.
I first came across the chap in the early noughts, and my general conclusion was
“Here’s a fellow who thinks he’s very, smart, but is only moderately so.”
His arguments were tended to include numerous rather basic errors of fact regarding European history, incorrect quotations, etc.
And the utterly ahistorical argument that absolute monarchy is the most reliable guarantor of property.
(That distant whirring noise you may hear is the British Whig aristocracy revolving like turbines in their graves)
His main failing, beside being a reactionary nut, is a juvenile addiction to epater le bourgeoisie and being rhetorically ironic to the point of incoherence.
His ambitions of being a modern political prophet, a cut-rate cross-over of Machiavelli and Hegel for our days, seem unlikely to be fulfilled any time soon.
More like the fairly clever but annoying kid in high school who’s discovered Nietszche and reckons he’s a candidate-superman.
I actually left a comment on a blog of his once, that went, roughly:
“If you are going to try for coherent elitist conservatism, you might do better to start with Santayana, Pareto, and Oakeshott, on the basis that they actually have something interesting to say that’s relevant to modern society, not late medieval Italy, or early 19th Century Germany. And unlike Nietszche are actually on the hither shores of sanity.”
He was not amused.
@Matt:
I know recoil royally effs up aim.
I wondered if the aim isn’t that good to begin with, though, whether a messed up inaccurate aim might become accurate as it gets messed up.
@Kathy:
Rule of thumb on automatic fire: “The longer the burst the further off target you get.”
DeD, Trump moved just before the shot. Moving target makes the near miss plausible for me.
@Matt:
In my experience, from long ago, even a .22 recoil self loader with a fixed target takes a while to sort, in low-stress situations.
I only shot a .303 bolt action a couple of times, and again in low-stress target shooting, was pretty damn poor.
Precise rifle shooting takes some time and good deal of practice for most people to master.
Against moving targets in stress, even more so, by accounts of most experienced shooters I’ve met.
@Kathy:
That’s where the probabilities are factored in. Also, recoil will not mess up the aim, since it is an after-the-trigger-pull effect. The hands just have a normal movement that will vary the aim point. Poor hand grip and jerking the trigger are the usual culprits that screw up a good shot.
@CSK: It’s all good. Since Bing created/accessed a sidebar feature and my phone started allowing me to navigate away from/return to my base site easily, it’s been a lot easier to keep up with references I have no idea about. The phone and computer are almost as easy as doing research with multiple sources at the library used to be.
@Gustopher: I’ll go with number 2; although the possibility that he is a lizard person can’t be discounted.
WaPo has an article about Vance up, top if the page for me if that means anything anymore (I suspect rotating headlines for different users)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/07/28/vance-debut-rocky/
Some people may be out for blood. Is it only a matter of time before some people start calling for him to be sacked?
Has our media gotten addicted to the feeling of power that comes from destroying a candidate? Bothsiderism really requires them to destroy a Republican candidate, to remain impartial.
@dazedandconfused:
@DeD:
See, that’s not how it works in movies and TV.
Now, I’m old enough to know what’s poetic license. But also, watching a lot of Mythbusters teaches that not all that’s depicted in movies and TV is wrong, only about 98% of it.
@Gustopher:
I think they are deeply confused by what Biden and Harris managed to pull off. The fact that it came together so fast, that everyone got on board immediately, there was no chaos, no real backbiting or weird shit, seems to have really screwed with their brains. It defied the narrative and they didn’t know how to respond. Add in the almost immediate, non-stop clowning of Vance and they were just so confused that they just changed the labels from “Democrats in Disarray” to “Trump in Disarray” and left it at that. Mostly comfortable, even if they can’t sell “Republican daddies will fix everything.”
@Gustopher:
Maybe they just don’t like a VP candidate who wears eye liner?
@DeD: I’ve seen some allegations the kid deliberately grazed his ear. My take from your expertise, and others, is that would require impossible marksmanship. But, as @Gustopher: said, the bullet had to go somewhere. I’d find a bit of debris hitting his ear credible, but no one seems to have identified a shattered teleprompter or anything else. I’ve had thoughts about Trump having a movie blood capsule, but I can’t see how they’d have arranged the rest of the plot. I like the cufflink idea. Relatedly, I like (less seriously) @Just nutha ignint cracker:’s idea he’s a lizard person.
To feed the fire, I would add a couple observations. First, anything involving Ronnie Jackson is inherently questionable. Especially with no supporting info from the actual treating physicians. Second, in photos I’ve seen the injury seems to be to the upper part of the right ear. What I read says the first shot hit his ear. The famous bullet streak photo would seem to be the first shot, because Trump hasn’t reacted. but extending the line of the streak doesn’t seem to line up with where his right upper ear would be. The photo would be at most a couple milliseconds after the bullet passed him, not enough time for him to have moved enough to matter, even if he was already turning his head. Not alleging anything, I can’t come up with, and haven’t seen, any credible conspiracy theory. But there do seem to be loose ends that don’t fit. No one else seems to have publicly questioned the streak picture, so maybe I’m missing something obvious.
@JohnSF:
Did he ban you?
The interesting thing to me about Hegel is the diversity of major and minor theorists his work directly influenced.
I suppose one could say that about many major philosophers, but Hegel’s coattails seem to be particularly diverse–touching many large and small puddles.
@Kurtz:
Can’t recall, tbh; it was a blogspot site back in 2008-ish, iirc, so I don’t even know if bans were possible, or how pursued.
His reply was along the lines of I was a low grade intellect captured by the liberal consensus who could not understand …. yadda, yadda,
I never went back to check, because on the whole, I couldn’t have given a damn.
I actually checked just an hour or so ago (first time since), and all the posts are now moved to his new site, and all comments gone.
Such is the transient nature of the interwebs.
“Sandcastles on the beach.”😉
As for Hegel, his main legacy was to influence Marx.
And not in a good way.
Plus a few rather forlorn continental monarchists who generally ended up being cannibalized by fascism
The whole dialectic concept was taking a abstraction of Platonic philosophy, and trying to jam historical processes into it.
Both Popper and Russell have done pretty thorough demolitions of Hegelianism.
And Santayana did so in just one sentence:
@gVOR10:
You remind me of two Mythbusters eps. In one, among other myths, they try to light a strike anywhere match with a bullet. I mean, they fire a bullet at the match and light it. They were about 1 or 2 meters away, the pistol held in a clamp, aimed with a laser bore sighter, and it took them multiple tries until they succeeded. Hitting an ear from many more meters away is more like magic.
The other was whether one could move out of the way of a sniper’s bullet, if one saw the shot fired. Answer: busted. The maximum distance at which a flash from a sniper’s gun would be visible, would let the bullet arrive well before you could react to the flash.
So, they cheated and used a “Hollywood round,” which makes a bigger, brighter flash. I forget the distance, but it was really far away.
Naturally they didn’t shoot bullets at each other. instead they synchronized a paintball gun near them, to fire at such a time after the flash far away to have the pellet hit them at the time the bullet would have (clear?)
The high speed shots of Adam and Jamie moving out of the way of the bullet are hilarious. In real time, it looks like they move right away, very fast. In the super-slow motion high speed cameras make possible, they stand doing nothing for several seconds, then with glacial slowness try to twist away from the bullet’s path.
I know I have a recency and availability bias problem. But the Mythbusters did a lot, and I mean a lot, of gun myths, and some are applicable to rare situations that do happen in real life. They also did a lot of experiments that are completely useless, like making a cannon out of leather, or testing whether Kirk could have improvised a bamboo cannon to kill a Gorn (busted), but were fun to watch.
Too lazy to go looking for this sort of trivia, but I recall one article that I scanned about the kid said that though he went to gun ranges to practice, his reputation was that he was not particularly a good shot. My take is that he hit Trump by happenstance. I see no reason to pursue the topic further.
Currently on the White Dudes for Harris video thing. About 60K on and Jeff Bridges, the ur-Dude, is talking at the moment.
After Elon reposted an altered a Harris video to make it sound like she called herself a DEI hire.
In response to California Gov. Gavin Newsom writing on X that it should be illegal to digitally alter ads like this, Musk posted early Monday morning, “I checked with renowned world authority, Professor Suggon Deeznutz, and he said parody is legal in America.”
The richest man in the world. I have to admit Professor Suggon Deeznutz is a new one. It shows growth, the old Misk would have used the standbys like I P Daily or Ivan Jerkinoff.
@Lucysfootball:
Sounds like Xlon was moved from the second to the fourth grade.
@Kurtz:
Me too. Or, more precisely, PRNGs, which is what I studied in grad school and taught to undergrads. As best I recall, there are two separate but equally important aspects to it:
1. Generating pseudorandom uniform random variates
2. Transforming those into independent draws from the target distribution of choice
I still think Luc Devroye’s Non-uniform random variate generation may be the most perfect textbook I’ve ever read.
@Mikey: Tim Walz is on now. He is super likeable. Talks like an old NCO. Good stuff.
@DrDaveT:
I was hoping you were around. You’re the person here I thought of when I was writing that post.
@JohnSF:
Hegel influenced Adorno specifically, and much of the rest of critical theory. Whether it’s a good thing or not, depends on perspective.
@Mikey: Agree on Walz. Best speaker was either him or Pete – though I am still laughing at Brad Whitaker’s celebrating the “Rainbow of Beige”.
@Kurtz:
Heh, I’m flattered.
The uniform part is important too — there are all kinds of subtle statistical tests for quality of PRNG outputs. Many of them have to do with verifying that successive pairs/triples/whatever don’t have unwanted correlations. I remember seeing a demonstration of how bad the built-in RAND() function in a former version of Excel was, by plotting successive draws as (x,y) points and visually seeing that they all fell on a relatively small number of parallel lines.
The classic Box-Muller method for generating normal/Gaussian random variates works by taking two uniforms and turning them into two independent standard normal variates. If your uniforms are correlated, your normals will be too…
@Lucysfootball:
If parody’s fair game, how about a voiceover of Xlon saying “I’m a transphobic bigot with the emotional intelligence of a toddler”
It would be close to the truth.
@gVOR10:
That’s hollywood level of bullshit and anyone arguing that isn’t someone to take seriously.
@Kathy: This is why match rounds exist. Bullets carefully produced to maximize accuracy and consistency (at a cost). The rifling twist rate matters too and must be properly chosen for the round in use.
So even if you properly squeeze the trigger without flinching in a perfect shot stance you’re still at the mercy of the barrel and bullet/powder.
Once when heading to the range to meet up with some friends for some target practice I stopped by academy sports to pick up some cheap 7.62×39. I can’t remember the name of the manufacturer but it was crown something related. Anyway that box was horrible with inconsistent powder loads AND zingers galore. A zinger is when a round flies off target and in my case they were flying at least a foot off target at 50 yards which is just ridiculous.
Shitty ammo is a good part of the reason why the AK47 has a reputation of being inaccurate and the m16/ar15 platforms being “unreliable”..