While I'd agree that Trump is lying, Qasim's 77.1% & 75,2% are a classic example of how to misuse statistics. An alternative hypothesis is that the percentage of distributors and producers depends on wealth - you need capital for either and you aren't going to get a loan from the bank for something illegal.

An example of how to tell is to use a chi-square test for categorical data (see the link for some other tests).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi-squared_test#Example_chi-squared_test_for_categorical_data

I just made a Danish cucumber salad (Agurksalat) for a birthday party, using a recipe I found after a search pointed me to nordicfoodliving.com. But, when I printed it out to take to the kitchen, the page started with a couple of error messages - something about a 403 forbidden code when trying to load some file ending in "autoupdate.php". Sounds to me like you can't trust anyone these days - a good reason to use the NoScript extension!

I received two unwanted text messages from +1 415 570 9364. The second was an alleged request for whatever from some guy running for governor. The previous one was a completely blank message. Are others seeing spam from this phone number? I suspect it belongs to an advertising business.

@anselmschueler @QasimRashid This is new law--it just revokes the tax exempt status of several named groups.

https://lis.virginia.gov/bill-details/20261/HB167

#caltrain I used Caltrain yesterday and notices that the powers that be had put up a poster near the door. Unfortunately, they were rather clueless: they put it on a glass partition that you have to be able to see though to see the digital display that indicates the next stop. The picture below shows it almost completely hiding the display from where I was sitting.

Just heard about a new opera being performed by die Hamburgische Staatsoper, lampooning Donald Trump. It would be really funny if they showed it at the Kennedy Center now that Trump plastered his name on the building.

https://www.die-hamburgische-staatsoper.de/en/program/opera/1906-monster-s-paradise

While I couldn't tell if the vehicle had a driver in it - I didn't see one as it went by in a parking lot - I did see a Nuro self-driving vehicle make an illegal left turn today. I reported the incident to that company in case it was a software error and not a driver mistake. The car had failed to merge into a center turn lane before making a left turn, instead moving slowly or stopping in a "through" lane before turning.

Waymo helped me get home from a New Years Eve party last night even though I didn't use it. I had a parking space not very far from an intersection with a freeway entrance and lots of people were using it. I had to cross a right-turn lane and then get into a through lane (followed by a questionable U turn to get away from the mess). The Waymo vehicle "politely" let me in: it is not in Waymo's interest to risk damaging a lidar sensor to save a passenger a couple of seconds.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Plus, if anyone needs some humor in these trying times, check out the tee shirt I saw today (I fuzzed out the person's face just in case he didn't want to be identified);

I just saw a livestream (San Francisco Opera) of the new opera The Monkey King. Highly recommended - if anyone is interested it will be shown on-demand starting 10 AM PST on Nov. 23, at a cost of $25.

Funny ICE video: some guy (with an American accent) taunts them, saying he is not a U.S. citizen, but does not threaten them. Instead of acting professionally, the ICE guys chase him. Bicycles are faster than pedestrians.

https://abc7chicago.com/post/border-patrol-agents-chase-cyclist-he-claims-hes-not-us-citizen-dearborn-street-loop/17904440/

@TotalSonic @DJHVII I've enclosed a link to mathworld.wolfram.com showing the Mercator projection with latitude lines. It clearly shows that the scale factor changes with the distance from the equator. If areas are more important to you than preserving angles (locally), then use an equal-area projection.

If you see an image with more of the northern hemisphere than the southern hemisphere, someone cropped it - not the fault of the projection.

https://mathworld.wolfram.com/MercatorProjection.html

System76 Launch Keyboards are manufactured in Denver, Colorado. Our switch installer can install switches into an empty frame in under 1 minute! #manufacturing #LaunchKeyboard #Keyboard

How to tell a beginner programmer from an expert ....

Beginner: "The program worked!!!"
Expert: "The program worked? I must not have done enough testing."

That poll on how fast you drive compared to the speed limit is missing some context: is the answer what you would tell (a) your insurance compan, (b) a police officer who pulled you over, (c) your spouse/partner, (d) your parents if still young enough to be using their car, or (e) some random person who has no idea as to your name/address and no way of finding out.

#system76 I'm running Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS on multiple computers at home. After something like 17 years, my HP-1320 laser printer died. Since HP now allegedly prevents customers from using 3rd party ink cartridges or whatnot, I replaced it with a Brother HL-L2460DW, plugging it into an Ethernet connection.

Things worked so smoothly on a Thelio system that I skipped installing print drivers on a Pangolin laptop and it actually worked with nothing extra installed! Thanks to Linux developers!

I'm not sure if this article is the result of a LLM hallucinating or if the reason for the nonsense is something else, but I found a link to this article on the "science" section of Google News.

It reminded me of the time someone wrote a humorous article about the Neutrino Bomb: unfortunately, a U.S. senator saw it and wanted to know why we weren't funding its development. Then someone had to tell the senator that he had been had without saying he had been had.

https://www.ecoticias.com/en/infinite-energy-neutrino-universe/12271/

Simulation hint: in the 1980s, I wrote a simulation of a some Internet routing algorithms, with random changes to the status of the links (on, off, etc.). If only because we were publishing the results, I did some tests of the random number generator we were using. The documentation claimed that all bits were usable. An FFT looked suspicious and further checking showed that the values mod N were periodic. It needed a larger state size (a minimum size was not documented).

BTW, I created the images of Putin and the baby Trump by using an editor I wrote
(search for org.bzdev.epts) that makes it easy to draw paths with a background image as a guide. Then I used inkscape to combine the two images and create the chain. While EPTS can create SVG fiels, its main purpose is to create paths and output those in a variety of formats, including ones that can be used directly by scripting languages, as inputs to animations or simulations.

#Musk I posted a tute a few days ago that ended with a wisecrack, "Look at what Must did to Twitter."

Oddly I got an email from fosstodon saying I was mentioned by elonmusk001o@mastodon.social suggesting I sent a private message via telegram for more information but only "dedicated fans" get a response. However, no 'mention' could be found when I logged into mastodon.

Has anyone else seen this behavior - I kind of wonder if a LLM is determining who gets a canned reply that is then deleted.