Base rate fallacy dooms TSA’s risk-based screening
“Risk-based screening, if it describes any partitioning of airline passengers at checkpoints, is a fraud. It doesn’t matter what the criteria are for putting passengers into low-risk and high-risk categories, because the concept is mathematically unsound.
The base rate fallacy is the failure to account for underlying incidence of the condition being tested for. Imagine this hypothetical (and completely fantastical) scenario: that the TSA employs a near-perfect test for risk-based screening, a test that always flags terrorists if they are present and only flags innocent people 1 time out of 10,000. (The TSA’s actual success rate at flagging known terrorists is zero.)
Under these conditions, only one out of every five million people flagged would be a terrorist. This is the base rate fallacy in operation. In other words, for all intents and purposes, every flagged person is a false positive.”
“I love my wife. My wife is dead.”
29-May-12
Such a bittersweet letter.
“In June of 1945, Arline Feynman — high-school sweetheart and wife of the hugely influential physicist, Richard Feynman — passed away after succumbing to tuberculosis. She was 25-years-old. 16 months later, in October of 1946, Richard wrote his late wife the following love letter and sealed it in an envelope. It remained unopened until after his death in 1988. “
I *heart* Tim Mincin
21-May-12
SAIL – AWOLNation (or How to make a fan video that gets 50% more views than the official video)
15-May-12
The official video:
Ron Paul supporters taking over the GOP
14-May-12
Ron Paul supporters are quietly taking over the GOP. Although Ron Paul has not won the popular vote of a single primary or caucus, he has won the majority of the delegates from Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado, Massachusettes, Louisiana, and Washington. He’s also on track to win many more–it’s likely that there will eventually be hundreds of Ron Paul delegates at the GOP convention.
While Romney still probably has enough to win, Paul supporters could make things very uncomfortable for him. And Ron Paul supporters have also won positions in key slots of the Republican Party apparatus. For example, a Ron Paul supporter, A.J. Spiker, was elected to be chairman of the Iowa GOP. Even if Paul doesn’t win this year, he’s building a formidable machine that will help pro-liberty candidates (such as his son Rand) win election in the future.
Check out the havoc Ron Paul supporters are wreaking with the Old Guard Republicans.
Delicious.
The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off
11-May-12
If you’re ever tempted to feel self-pity, may I commend this video to you:
What is real love?
06-May-12
Via Alexis Bright
We live under a massive cultural delusion about the nature of real love. Propagated by mainstream media, from the time you’re born you’re inundated with the belief that love is a feeling and that when you find “the one” you’ll sense it in your gut and be overcome by an undeniable sense of knowing. When the feeling and corresponding knowing fade (for the knowing is intimately linked to the feeling) and the work of learning about real love begins, most people take the diminished feeling as a sign that they’re in the wrong relationship and walk away. And then they start over again, only to find that the now-familiar knowing and feeling fade again… and again… and again.
If love isn’t a feeling, what is it?
Love is action. Love is tolerance. Love is learning your partner’s love language and then expressing love in a way that he can receive. Love is giving. Love is receiving. Love is plodding through the slow eddies of a relationship without jumping ship into another’s churning rapids. Love is recognizing that it’s not your partner’s job to make you feel alive, fulfilled, or complete; that’s your job. And it’s only when you learn to become the source of your own aliveness and are living your life connected to the spark of genius that is everyone’s birthright can you fully love another.
Although it’s nearly impossible to capture this elusive word into a single definition, M. Scott Peck says it poignantly in The Road Less Traveled:
Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.
Festo – Air Inversion
27-Apr-12
Festo makes some amazing stuff. As someone once said “”That thing looks like it could origami
through time”.