nondeterministic . net

It has been a slow day of authorizing the Technion to move money into and out of my bank account… … so I watched an after-the-fact webcast of the first presidential debate (Poland! Poland!) and caught up on the news. After reading the NY Times Tube Treatise, I have to ask: we find tubes that are too long, too narrow, too thick, and improperly coated for use in a uranium centrifuge but that exactly match in material and specifications tubes already known to be used as combustion chambers in small conventional Iraqi rockets, and a months-long debate within the intelligence community is the result? Somebody needs to take a jumbo-sized Occam’s Razor to the employment rolls of these organizations. And then use it to scrape the already shredded credibility of the pack of liars in the White House off the national table so Americans can get their country back.

Speaking of elections, the next person talking about election reform who mentions Instant Runoff Voting is going to get it. Yes, we need to eliminate plurality voting, but for the last time: IRV is a mathematically unsound and logistically brain-dead voting system. Since the best system we know, Condorcet with Cloneproof Schwartz Sequential Dropping, sounds too scary for anyone to accept at this point (Schwarz! Schwartz!), approval voting is probably the way to go. Please refer to EMERG for technical details and an argument along these lines.

And finally, to address Mr. Barrett’s pointed comment on my previous post, I should clarify that the Israeli Knesset fixes the dates and times of IDT each year, but does so on a year-by-year basis, with nothing resembling the computer programmer’s understanding of a “fixed system.” Based on reading the zoneinfo sources for Israel, it seems that attempts to tie the daylight time dates to the Gregorian calendar always end up requiring exceptions to avoid falling on the ever-relatively-shifting holidays of the Jewish calendar.

There we have it.

maxg

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