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Sheep Have Wool

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by Sheep Have Wool

  1. 2 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

    New witness--Gary Farro

     

    Donald Trump’s motorcade left 100 Centre Street at 4:42 pm. A few dozen gawkers, including a small gaggle of conspicuous Trump supporters waving four large flags, strained in vain for a glimpse of the former president. Through the afternoon, those demonstrators traded chants of “We Love Trump” with another group of protesters, who yelled back, “Lock Him Up.”

     

    Court will not be in session on Monday. We will be back Tuesday morning.

     

     

    And now we're adjourned for the day. Trump looks utterly spent as he rises at the end of the long first week of testimony in his criminal trial. As he passes reporters, he grimaces, then glares, putting on a braver face as he leaves the courtroom.

    The defense has already told the jurors that Michael Cohen is a liar who is out to get his revenge on Trump. But the witnesses have painted a slightly different portrait — of a very anxious, harried man, who, while he still worked for Trump, would do whatever he could for his boss. “Every time Michael Cohen spoke to me, he gave me a sense of urgency,” Gary Farro just said.

    This material is dry but the prosecutor, Rebecca Mangold, is questioning Gary Farro slowly and deliberately. Farro said that Michael Cohen was eager to connect with him and wanted to open a limited liability company immediately. Farro then took steps to open an account for him and specified with his team that Cohen didn’t want addresses on the checks.

    Trump is leaning forward, reading an email that is being read into evidence about Gary Farro missing a call from Michael Cohen.

     

    Enter Michael Cohen, Trump's former fixer. “Do you know someone named Michael Cohen,” Rebecca Mangold, the prosecutor, asks. “Yes I do,” Farro answered. His knowledge of Cohen, who was assigned to him as a client, is the reason he’s here, of course.


    For those familiar with Cohen, Farro is making a number of telling statements. He says that he was thought of as someone who was good at working with “individuals who may be a little challenging,” though he says he didn’t find Cohen “difficult.” He also comments on Cohen’s apparent excitement to be working for Trump.

    After the first two witnesses testified about Trump’s personal behavior, we’re getting a dry recitation of banking transactions now, a reminder of what this trial’s charges relate to.

     

    First Republic Bank, Gary Farro reminds the jurors, no longer exists. It was seized and sold by regulators last year, one of several banks that were the casualties of bank runs after interest rate hikes. Farro, colorfully, referred to this as “last year’s demise.”

    Rebecca Mangold will question Gary Farro for the prosecution. She has been on the team for several years, and she typically sits with Christopher Conroy, another prosecutor, behind the main table. This may be the first time I’ve heard her speak in court.

    Justice Merchan is back on the bench. Prosecutors call Gary Farro to the stand as the third witness.


    Farro was a banker at First Republic when Michael Cohen was seeking to arrange the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels. Cohen, seeking to get the money together, was contacted by Farro’s assistant at First Republic Bank


    Prosecutors forgot something very important — the jury. They will have to call Farro again once the jurors enter. It’s Friday afternoon, all right.

    It looks like your updates are now going in reverse chronological order. Or I'm having a stroke. 

    Regardless, thank you for the continued updates.

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  2. On 8/23/2023 at 2:06 PM, Magus Ossis said:
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    As those who wade through scientific literature will attest, a common benchmark for assigning statistical significance is 95% probability; if the null hypothesis (chance occurrence alone) explains the phenomenon of interest with less than 5% likelihood, we say that the event was most likely due to some cause or constellation of causes. Few who claim scientifically to believe that life on earth arose spontaneously have bothered to look at the reasonability of the null hypothesis of this occurrence with even marginal rigor. We could start with some extremely favorable (for random generation of life) assumptions:

    1. All of the earth’s carbon has been in a physical and chemical state amenable to reactions with other elements or chemicals for the entirety of earth’s existence. Let us ballpark the the number of carbon atoms at 2E45 and the age of the earth at 1E17s.
    2. 100% of all the earth’s carbon has always existed as nucleotides or chains thereof, resulting in ballpark 2E44 nucleotides
    3. The genome of the ultimate progenitor cell was less than 5% the size of the shortest known genome of an independent archaebacterium, so circa 2E4bp
    4. Each nucleotide was in such a fortuitous environment that it joined a stable, unbranched nucleotide chain every microsecond, only to disassemble immediately and completely upon reaching length of 2E4 if the resulting chain did not encode the desired proto-cellular genome. Thus the average chain length at any given time was 1E4, and the average number of chains growing at a given time was 2E40. Each chain grew for 2E-2 seconds, meaning that a new chain started roughly 1E42 times per second. This results in 1E59 candidate chains since earth coalesced (ignoring that life actually arose far earlier).
    5. There are as many micro-genomes of the length selected that would result in viable outcomes (100 million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion = 1E80) as there are estimated to be atoms in the entire universe, despite none that short which fit the description ever having been found or suggested.
    6. The randomly assembled proto-genome did not degrade before causing the ongoing existence of a reproducing organism. Ribosomes and other cellular machinery necessary to protect, package, copy, interpret, and maintain the genome are unnecessary or magically provided; merely having the “instruction book” with no reader to follow the instructions is adequate to create a viable cell.

     

    Of all the assumptions made above, it is #6 that may be the most problematic. Expecting a project to build itself because a set of instructions appears without any tools or materials would be unimaginable, and yet that is what #6 grants. Nevertheless, with all these unrealistic assumptions granted arguendo, we fall a bit short of the 95% probability needed to say that our thought experiment supports the null hypothesis, viz. the random appearance of primitive cellular life. The chance we reach is about (1 - (1 - 1E-13300)^1E59). This number is so small that scientific calculators will simply report it as zero. The calculated probability of the null hypothesis is not only less than 5%, it is almost unimaginably less than one trillionth of one percent.

     

    In science and in endeavors that lean on common tools of scientific study, we do not offer absolute proof. We evaluate (leaning on our reason) whether data support a given hypothesis. It is always possible for our worldview to lead us to reject what the data seem to suggest. The above thought experiment is not irrefutable proof that life on earth did not arise by chance. Following, however, the usual criteria, one would reject the null hypothesis. Depending on which definition of deity one means (distinguishing, e.g, between Aristotle’s and Brigham Young’s), one might consider the implausibility of stochastic forces’ leading to life as we know it as a reason to consider an external cause.

    A brief thought experiment regarding spontaneous versus caused origin of life on earth.

    I noticed no one had commented on this "thought experiment" - presumably because they were told there would be no math - but it's such a good example of its ilk that I couldn't pass by without comment. They're easy to make: start with conclusion that conforms to your worldview, construct a straw man that misconstrues what climatologists/immunologists/biologists/real scientists actually say, and then use science words and math and *chef's kiss* Latin to demolish it. Afterwards, monetize it with a YouTube video, podcast, and your choice of religion/cult/political party.

    Good scientists work really hard to disprove their hypotheses. If after trying as hard as you can to disprove an idea your hypothesis still makes sense, then maybe you're onto something. Probably not, though.

    In this specific case, the argument is basically that because it's spectacularly, unbelievably unlikely that even a "micro-genome" could be created randomly, abiogenesis is essentially impossible. The math is correct-ish, it's just that biologists don't actually think that basic chemicals spontaneously came together to produce anything that remotely resembled a modern organism. Without diving too far down the biology rabbit hole, there are lots of intermediate steps that scientists think happened along the way, and those things are extremely likely to have happened. For one thing, biochemistry isn't something that just happens randomly, and you can generate self-replicators in very short time scales. This argument is the rough equivalent of saying that humans could never make helicopters because all they started off with were rocks and sticks and fire.

    Has science solved the origin of life? Nope. There are still some tricky bits left - it's just that those bits seem likely to fall into the "shit we just haven't figured out yet" category rather than the "supernatural causes" category, just like every other time we've run into something that we thought could only be explained by the presence of a deity. A helpful heuristic? When you see an argument on the internet that says something as ridiculous as "Few who claim scientifically to believe that life on earth arose spontaneously have bothered to look at the reasonability of the null hypothesis of this occurrence with even marginal rigor", it's probably bullshit.

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  3. 20 minutes ago, 'stache said:

    I’ve softened on people talking busing EarPods because I do that too now. I use speaker too often but not in iublic. I have a huge issue about people hearing my conversations.

    It seems like you're paranoid and having a stroke, so it's likely you fit right in with the olds under discussion.

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  4. 26 minutes ago, HateYouAndMyself said:

    Can we please not have a LaJohntay and Johntay on the same team at the same position? I get a headache just thinking about announcers / media stumbling over that shit all season. Or likewise making the same corny ass comments about it every single weekend as if their crew was the first to notice. 

    Have you heard that their fathers were roommates?

  5. 8 minutes ago, MrX said:

    Stumbled onto this thread. Awesome. 
     

    Azul is really fun. 
     

    We have Quacks of Quedlinburg but when I opened it, it felt overwhelming. Our kids are 10 (four of us). Too early or plow ahead?

     

    Plow ahead. If you're struggling, there are some rules explanation videos on YouTube that are available.

  6. 6 minutes ago, sith_horn said:

    I won't be surprised if this turns out to be true or false. Big 12 crews aren't the only refs that get calls wrong. I will say that our edges would have more sacks this season if holding was called appropriately. On the flip side, Washington's tackles are both good, so they have their work cut out for them. If they can't get to the QB, I just hope they hold the edge and allow the interior to push the pocket, and our LBs/DBs to take care of the rest.

    @sushihorn had a great post earlier in the week with stats on Big XII pass rush performance in bowl games relative to the regular season.

    The TL;DR: Washington?prepareyouranus GIF by FirstAndMonday

     

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  7. 1 minute ago, Vic Mackey said:
    5 minutes ago, FOXHOUND said:
    No, I will be alone in my room like I was for the 2006 Rose Bowl. My family knows to leave me be on the 2nd weekend of October so this won't be any different. 

    This is how I prefer to watch big games now days. I'll be pacing back and forth and drinking whisky alone in the living room. I feel more comfortable like this than watching with a big crowd like at a bar.

    NTTAWWT

  8. 15 minutes ago, billfromlaketravis said:

    Explain this one to me. He didn’t record a catch for fOSU in 2023.

    I'm from Missouri on this guy, but this is the sort of stat that makes me curious about the NIL/portal market and how negotiation works there. The Texas roster has a number of players who haven't shown up in stats in a significant way that I think it would suck to lose, but how much bandwidth does Texas - or anyone else - have to look for them on other teams?

  9. 3 hours ago, alphahydro said:

    it looked to me like Oregon didn't really make adjustments until shortly before halftime.  Once they did, they scored 28 and UW scored 14, but it was too late. 

    This seems like the Washington blueprint for success on offense. They're experienced at QB/WR, so their passing game handles novelty/team idiosyncrasies more easily than most of their opponents' offenses do. They score early, pace themselves, and by the time the other team sorts shit out, the game is mostly over.

    If I was @satyanash, this would be my concern, dude, but our DL is going to get a ton of pressure and holding calls early with non-Big XII officiating, and our capacity for late game burst is much better than their previous opponents. Washington is going to get skull fucked.

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  10. 13 minutes ago, TheMailBox357 said:

    I just looked up tOSU's 2023 season team stats & it looks like Bryson Rodgers didn't have a single reception + he was a '23 unanimous nationally unranked low 4-star recruit coming out high school in Florida.

    He doesn't fit the profile for the type of player UT would go after in the portal. Especially when UT already has 3 '23 nationallly ranked unproven WRs on the roster they already like.

    My favorite parts of your posts are the grammar and spelling errors.

    My least favorite? The grease stains.

    lord of the rings no friends GIF

    Why are you here, Ketch?

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