Kelandon

No, it's any zip file, no matter how small.

Okay, KPPP is partially back up. For reasons I can't figure out right now, Freewebs won't let me upload zip files right now, and I give up on trying to figure it out tonight. So it's only partly posted again (notably, Alint is not back up), but it's a start, and I'll work out more of the details later.

KPPP will be back up shortly, with all previous content. Not sure exactly when, but I should have time to figure out the hosting situation not that long from now. I would rather that at least my stuff not be hosted anywhere until then.

Anecdotes help people understand abstractions. I can articulate a trend in flat wages, unemployment, home foreclosures, consumer debt, and robo-signing without getting how all those pieces fit together. But if I hear a story about someone whose bills mounted up until he couldn't pay them without credit card debt and then lost his job with no savings cushion, leading to an overly-rapid foreclosure that didn't follow the law, I can understand the human impact of these trends in the data. It's one thing to know that high unemployment is bad; it's kind of another to understand why it's bad, and how it interacts with other indicators.

The recovery is just painfully slow and not happening for everyone at once. And there's still the foreclosure crisis. But unemployment is down (even if still too high), and growth continues, albeit slowly.

[insert kwilting reference]

Conduction: Heat itself flows. Convection: Hot material flows. Radiation: Hot material glows.

If Santorum ultimately wins the nomination, I will laugh. A lot.

Unless I'm greatly mistaken, no one in BoA history has ever tried to release a scenario under any specific licensing, which means that there's no reason for any database to list copyright/permissions. It would say the same thing for all scenarios anyway.

It's not all that odd. (Says Kel.)

This topic needs more Edguy. Most topics need more Edguy.

As far as I can tell, other than 9/11, the so-called "terrorist" attacks in the past decade or so have been random acts of violence perpetrated by lunatics, rather than organized terrorist assaults (with one or two exceptions). You could more easily call Jared Loughner a terrorist than most of the people listed.

We never cry for love - we're superheroes We are back where we belong

How many relationships have you been in? On Spiderweb, or IRL? Uh, just kidding. I think.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer @Kel - When did you switch from Classics and Astronomy to Law? It wasn't so much a switch as, well, I finished those degrees a few years ago, so now it's time for another one. But I started law school back in August.

My apologies for my parents' local ISP suddenly dropping web hosting from the service without telling anyone. They're too unreliable anyway. Anyone have suggestions about where KPPP should go? I can put all the stuff back up as soon as I have a host.

Stareye is some sort of nuclear engineer, right? That's pretty physics-y. I feel like we have a fair number of people who have studied bio seriously (and may have worked in it at some point). And not enough lawyers.

While we only have one data point in a certain sense (Earth), we can look at what evolved to fill similar niches after mass extinctions to give us some very, very general sense of at least certain probabilities. We didn't end up with complex mammals the first time evolution filled empty niches for large animals. Most famously, dinosaurs came earlier, and mammals showed up only after those niches were emptied and given a chance to be filled again. Of course, the niches changed somewhat between then and now, too, which affected what filled them. But the point remains the same, at least for extraterrestrial life: something that looks like us is really, really specific and path-dependent. However, I suppose to know about the probabilities of complex life at all (say, multicellular life), we'd have to look at a mass extinction that wiped out all multicellular life and see what came about after such a thing. I'm not sure that there's ever been anything so extensive that we know anything about.

Given the inordinately large number of extrasolar planets that we've found (I think the count is in the 700's now) in the few years that we've been looking, and given the number in the Goldilocks zone where Earth-like life could exist (a handful), I figure extraterrestrial life is very, very likely. Life might be pretty boring, though. Complex, multicellular organisms are by no means inevitable, and intelligent life even less so, speech and communication less so still. The odds of that are much harder to estimate, but I'd think that there's probably no one we could talk to in any distance at which we could actually reach them.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: Kelandon You know, "uterine contents" seems marginally less awkward to me than "zygote/embryo/fetus." pro tip: the catchall term you're looking for is "conceptus" You mean the company dedicated to the revolutionary design, development, and marketing of innovative solutions to advance women's health, stock letters CPTS? Or the manufacturer of the mouth-operated camera? "Without pictures, it's just a story." Or the folk rock/pop/surf band from San Diego, CA? And let me not leave out Fut Conceptus Manufacturing Nigeria Ltd.!

You know, "uterine contents" seems marginally less awkward to me than "zygote/embryo/fetus." Split government would be great if it actually created compromises that took the best ideas from both sides. Compare that to what's happening right now.

Originally Posted By: Harehunter And I strongly agree that people who vote should present some form of ID when voting. Why the liberals are against this, I cannot fathom, unless they are intending to have non-citizens vote. I don't believe that any non-citizen in this country, whether here legally or not, has that right, just as I have no right to vote in their country. And no, not all non-citizens are of one specific ethnic group or country of origin, but the Democrats would paint me as racist just for saying it. Edit: Photo ID is already required by so many businesses for financial transactions, regardless of ones economic or social standing. I agree that standing in line at the DMV for your drivers license photo ID is a pain in the glass. I agree that it could be made more convenient; but it is only one day in 8 years that I have to do that. And in the state of Texas, you do have to show some proof of citizenship or legal residency to get a license. And the license is clearly marked if a person is not a citizen. Some form of ID might not be a serious problem. The serious problem is the photo ID, which a substantial percentage of eligible voters don't have (as has been well documented, say, here, among other places). It might be easy enough for you to get, but that doesn't mean that it's easy enough for everyone to get (as documented, say, here). For people who don't have the requisite documents to get a driver's license (say, a birth certificate), which is surprisingly common among rural populations, the elderly, the poor, etc., the photo ID requirement is a serious problem. I don't think that disenfranchising 5-10% of the population is worth preventing hypothetical fraud. You might find it hard to believe that the percentage is that high, but this country is big and diverse, and you and I are hardly aware of large parts of it. The people who have studied the issue come up with that number pretty consistently. Voter ID laws of the most controversial kind today sound nice in theory but have terrible practical implications. Also, allowing states decide who to disenfranchise on their own has led to some serious problems in the past. There need to be limits.

The whole "voter fraud" thing comes across (at least to me) as a smokescreen for "let's disenfranchise the poor" because an extraordinarily small number of cases of actual, known voter fraud would be stopped by the measures proposed, but a vastly larger number of legitimate voters would be prevented from voting. I don't think there has been a single voting reform idea from major state Republicans in the past few years that wouldn't (empirically) do enormously more harm than good, in straightforward # disenfranchised > # of fraudulent votes prevented kind of way.

It varies a lot by where you are. San Francisco and surrounding counties have specifically insane local elections. California has insane state elections. As a result, anyone in the SF Bay Area is hit with a double-whammy. I'm led to believe that filling out a ballot is a lot easier in, say, New York. But yeah, it's usually 10-20 people, plus another couple dozen local and state initiatives or referendums. Almost makes me wish for a parliamentary system.

If I can file my taxes online, I should be able to vote online. More people in the US would vote if voting involved choosing fewer things. Wading through state propositions, county ballot measures, local rent stabilization board members, etc., is a nightmare. We should vote for at most two legislators and one executive at each of the three levels of government (local, state, federal) in each election. (And for god's sake, I should never be voting for judges. Or board/committee members of any kind.) I can handle nine votes. Fifty is beyond me, especially when they're for such minor positions/measures that even Google has no idea who/what the hell these people/things are. Basing drug regulation on pharmacology would probably be a good idea. Mass incarceration is probably a bad idea, and it stems directly from current drug laws. So...