Category Archives: Mathematics

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

“Denialism”

7 Comments

Does it exist? It’s hard to say:

It’s possible that with a lot of work, some extreme corner of the behavior spectrum could be isolated via specific criteria, which then merits labeling as ‘denialist’. But in truth the characteristics of our ‘proto-denialists’ above are radically different to expectations from the current framing, a framing which may have tainted the term beyond redemption. Nor is this approach a great plan even without that taint, because it tends to mask uncomfortable yet crucial truths, especially those in f) and g). So along with other errors we may end up fooling ourselves that there’s a nice clinical division between skeptics and ‘denialists’. Via naïve assumption of cause from a basic categorization of rhetoric, this is exactly the trap I believe Diethelm and McKee have fallen into. Hoofnagle goes further, dishing out labels of ‘dishonest’ and ‘crank’ yet without proper theoretical grounds; despite his noble motives many of these are bound to stick onto the wrong people. Some dishonesty and crankiness will ride any cultural wave, or backlash to such a wave, or backlash to an evidential cause that is perceived as cultural encroachment. But this does not mean that cranks and liars drive the main action; they do not. Nor can the touted methods reliably distinguish crankiness from cultural influence, or skepticism from either.

I would note (as always) that “denial,” and “denialism,” and “denialist” are not scientific terms. They’re religious ones.

[Update a while later]

Bill Nye epitomizes the Left’s authority complex.

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Trump’s Empire State Victory

57 Comments

…changes nothing.

It’s still going to be very hard for that Democrat to win the Republican nomination.

[Update a few minutes later]

Don’t confuse primary success with general success:

Now, there’s no reason in principle why a candidate who wins “only” 12 or 13 million votes in the primaries (or even just five or six or seven million) could not win a general election. That depends entirely on the candidate and his campaign. But the point here is that even a terrific primary performance offers zero evidence that a candidate actually can win a general election. As all of the head-to-head polling illustrates, it isn’t even a sign that that said candidate would perform better in a general election than other candidates who got fewer votes in the primaries.

This is especially true in Trump’s case. His hard-core supporters fail to comprehend just how deeply unpopular he is with everybody else outside their relatively small group. According to the last eight polls taken on the question, Trump has an unfavorable rating of between 60 and 70 percent among the general population that will vote in the 2016 election. He is not that much more popular than the ebola virus. (Although no virus has ever tried to run for president, so we cannot be sure.)

Trump supporters seem to be quite delusional about this. There is no one who doesn’t have an opinion about him at this point — he has no up side. When someone as well known as him can’t beat someone as unpopular as Hillary Clinton, it would be insane to make him the nominee (particularly when it would be one Democrat versus another).

[Afternoon update]

Classless Crybaby Wants To Be America’s Complainer-in-Chief.

Rick Wilson is a cruel man, but fair.

[Thursday-morning update]

GOP delegates: Trump’s attacks may backfire on him.

You don’t say.

[Bumped]

[Update a while later]

D. C. McAllister agrees with me; Trump and his supporters don’t understand our system of government.

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The 97% Number That Won’t Die

40 Comments

The problem is that the issue is not whether or not “humans are causing global warming.” I can concede that there is a good possibility of that, and it still has zero implications for policy, absent quantification with sufficient confidence levels, which remain lacking.

[Afternoon update]

“Climatologists will say that the way the question is worded depends on whether they are included,” Morano said. “We have many skeptical scientists included as the 97 percent because of the way the questions [in surveys] are asked are so vague and broadly worded.”

Yup.

Administrative, Mathematics, Technology and Society

Email Issue

24 Comments

I’m trying to send myself email from my own Linux machine, via SMPT. I’ve written the following Python program:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

# Import smtplib for the actual sending function
import smtplib

# Import the email modules we’ll need
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

# Open a plain text file for reading. For this example, assume that
# the text file contains only ASCII characters.
with open(“test.txt”) as fp:
# Create a text/plain message
msg = MIMEText(fp.read())

# me == the sender’s email address
# you == the recipient’s email address
msg[‘Subject’] = “Test”
msg[‘From’] = “simberg@interglobal.org”
msg[‘To’] = “simberg@interglobal.org”

# Send the message via our own SMTP server.
s = smtplib.SMTP(‘localhost’)
print(“s has been opened”)
s.send_message(msg)
print(“after send_message”)
s.quit()
print(“End script”)

It runs with no errors, prints the statements to the terminal, but no email appears. How do I diagnose this?

[Update a while later]

Thanks for the help in comments. Still haven’t solved it, but the need for the application that I needed it for has gone away. Nonetheless, it would be good in general to know how to email from a Python script.

Business, Economics, Education, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Bill Nye The Fascist Guy

56 Comments

And NASA isn’t covering itself in glory here, either.

I was in the same room with Nye a couple nights ago, at a reception. I felt like I needed a safe space.