This phrase is often attributed to Mark Twain though that is disputed.

Statistics is a very powerful science/math. It allows you to see things that are not always obvious at a glance. It is also sort of complicated. Because I’m no longer a math nerd, having become a computer nerd this is my goto book whenever I have to actually do statistics. The Cartoon Guide to Statistics

My favorite story from the book, that I repeat often, is the story of a small post graduate business school. As part of their recruiting drive they reported that the average salary for somebody graduating with an MBA from their school was well above $150k.

This sounded wonderful. What they failed to mention was that they got this mean by adding up the first year salaries of all their graduates and dividing by the number of graduates, including the one graduate that went into the NBA with a multi million dollar first year salary. With the small size of the graduating class that salary drove the mean(average) way higher than the median.

The school didn’t tell a lie, they didn’t tell a damn lie, they just used statistics to lie for them.

Almost all measurements of natural phenomena fall into what is called “The Bell Curve”. The bell curve is defined as by the mean (sum of the samples divided by the number of samples) and standard deviation. The larger the standard deviation the wider the bell, the smaller the standard deviation the narrower the bell is. Small SD have steep sides.
Read More

One of the sharpest minds that ever became president according to democrats

https://youtube.com/shorts/2y3r3tX1Pjs?feature=share

And a feeble-minded president, again according to Democrats.

Making good music is hard. Not little hard, BIG hard.

My daughter loves to sing. She’s good at it. I started playing with recording her and went down the rabbit hole. Then I asked an actual audio engineer a “simple” question and got back a complicated and useful answer.

If you start with the simplest assumption, the performer is “good” everything after that point is in the realm of the audio engineer. What mic do you use? different mics have different responses (how they “hear” sound). They have different drop off points. I don’t understand it but you can get a mic that records everything the singer does but doesn’t hear other things.

Mics can get darn expensive and each one does a different job with different characteristics.

On top of that, you need to decide how you are micing the performance. Does each instrument and performer get a mic or do you mic the room or something in between. I remember my first Telarc recording. They choose to use just two microphones. One for left, one for right and they placed those mics in the concert hall at the “sweet spot”.

Amazing recording. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that I could hear the keys of the woodwinds.

Another huge requirement is room conditioning. There is a story that the acoustics at Carnegie hall were so incredible that any member of the audience could hear a whisper from anywhere on stage. During a refurbishment of the hall they accidently destroyed those acoustics and had to bring in audio engineers to fix what they had broken.

There are huge wooden disks hanging over the audience in the Baltimore Symphony hall, and big wooden cabinets with horns at the back of the stage. They are there to fix the acustics.

A recording study will normally condition the room in order to kill echos and outside sound. This makes for a very dead sounding recording. Add to that a mic that is very directional and you get a near perfect recording of a the performer that nobody really wants to listen to.

Again the audio engineer comes to our rescue. They add back the sound of the room. One of the biggest challenges is to make the reverb tell you about the room without sounding “fake”. The amature can crank the knob and it sounds like the recording was done in an echo chamber but it doesn’t sound “good”.

Now imagine trying to recreate a specific space. A particular concert hall or one of the famous cathedrals Europe? You have to do it right.

This is an example of audio engineering at its finest. The audio engineer recorded the performances in a studio, a dry signal. He then worked for endless hours to get the right set of reverbs to recreate the sound of a cathedral. An unmitigated success.

Give it a listen and then applaud the audio engineer, our own Miguel.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=BQeQZgu9WeM&feature=share

The WHO has declared Monkeypox to be a health emergency. According to them Monkeypox is going to become the next pandemic and kill you all!

NPR has helpfully put together an article explaining how to protect yourself from catching Monkeypox. It is very informative in that it strongly suggests that YOU, that’s right YOU, can catch it just by touching a surface that is contaminated!

The better answer is “Don’t have sex with strangers that have the pox.”

The virus also spreads through physical contact, including touching a lesion, as well as the exchange of some bodily fluids like saliva. An individual could become infected by touching items and surfaces shared with someone exhibiting symptoms.

As the virus can spread through skin-to-skin contact, the CDC advises people to exercise caution in situations where one can’t maintain some sense of personal space and bumping into others is impractical. In places where clothing is minimal and you could experience that contact, such as crowded raves and clubs, the risk goes up.

Potentially contaminated items like bedding, clothes and towels should be contained until you have time to do your laundry, the CDC recommends. Be sure to frequently wash your hands with soap and water as you’re cleaning and dispose of all cleaning materials when you’re done.
—Monkeypox explained: How to protect yourself and what to watch out for

In the entire article they seem to leave out a couple of very important pieces of information:

1. The survival rate in first world countries is currently 100%
2. There have been four deaths, all in Africa
3. The most common transmission vector is anal sex.
4. The gay community is currently the most highly effected group

As more than one politically incorrect person has pointed out, there is a perception that gay culture is very promiscuous and that there are many that are refusing to stop having sex while they are still contagious.

It might make its way into the general population but right now it is very contained.

For an organization that had no issues in telling the entire world to lock down for 2 weeks to slow the spread, they don’t seem to be at all interested in telling gay men “Keep it in your pants while you are contagious.”

Is there something about the gay culture that doesn’t care about the health ramifications? Why is it that WHO refuses to identify the primary transmission vector?

Nonce verification failed

We’ve been getting reports of people seeing this message when attempting to submit comments.

What is it? What does it mean? What does it do?

A Nonce in software is a one time token. You can think of it as a one time password. Because of the complications of current website deployments, methods we use to use no longer work so we send a one time token to your browser when you load a page.

This token/nonce is used to verify that the submission being made is being made by an actual user of the site and not a hacker. It protects the site. Why it is failing is under investigation. It looks like there might be an issue with caching or other things that are designed to speed up the webpage. We will continue looking into it.

How to fix

If you are submitting a comment, use the back button and you should see your comment sitting in the box. Make a copy of it.

Go to the home page and then navigate back to the individual article. You should now be able to paste your comment into the comment box and submit your comment.

Mississippi Board of Education votes to remove ban on guns in K-12 schools

If you read Divemedics blog you can read about how the Florida Guardian Program hasn’t been a great success. The gist is that while the state made it legal for teachers and staff to be armed within the schools, the “needs permission” of the local sheriffs and school board and and and meant that in the end only a very few “special” people got permission to carry.

Run of the mill teachers did not. I believe that his final analysis said no teachers are part of the Guardian Program.

Under Mississippi state law CCW holders should be allowed to carry on school property. The state Board of Education didn’t see it that way and banned guns in K-12 schools. This has now be reversed.

Of course there is a gotcha, this ALLOWS local school districts to allow CCW holders to carry on school campuses, but it doesn’t REQUIRE them to do so. I strongly suspect that this will turn into another victory in words but not deeds. This has been 11 years in coming.

The infringers are at it, telling us that “Teachers are just as likely as anyone to cause violence in the classroom”, “…Teachers might not be trained enough…”, “you don’t know how your fight or flight is going to react, and that’s going to cause more problems than it [solves]”.

Finally, this is the State DoE issuing this statement. Before it is implemented the State Board has to take action to allow guns in schools.

The repetitive bleating of the anti-gun people that it will be worse if a teacher has a gun and is able to effectively fight back against an armed shooter is tiring. Nothing in the statistics says that a teacher with a CCW is going to lose their mind and start killing students. Why do these people always believe that a gun is going to turn somebody into a murdering asshole?