L'Ombre de l'Olivier

The Shadow of the Olive Tree
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  • Francis Turner

All models are wrong, some are useless May 10, 2020

There's a famous saying in the world of (computer) models: "All models are wrong, some are useful." George Box There's an obvious corollary to that - namely that if some are useful, the others are useless. There are a bunch of tests that can be made to determine whether a model is useful or not. These include back testing it against historical data, testing predictions it makes against future events and so on. One of the key attributes of a useful model is that it should be repeatable and vary its output only when its inputs vary. This applies even...

By Francis Turner Vote5 0

Wuhan Coronavirus – An Origin Hypothesis Apr 6, 2020

The origin of the Wuhan coronavirus has always seemed a little underpants gnomes business-plan like with vagueness on some of the middle parts. I think it is fairly certain that the original reservoir from which the virus developed was a colony of horseshoe bats. And there seems little doubt that a particular Wuhan seafood animal market (a "wet" market) was the place where it really started to spread to the rest of Wuhan and thence the world. BUT The bit in the middle. The bit where the virus mutated and crossed over from bat to human host is less clear....

By Francis Turner Vote9 1

Wuflu Two Electric Boogaloo Feb 12, 2020

A few more days and more developments First we're seeing reports of Covid19 (as we are now supposed to call it) in North Korea. One sure sign of the regime’s fears is that it failed to stage a parade in central Pyongyang on Saturday, the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the country’s armed forces. Last year, Kim Jong Un himself presided over the procession that displayed the North’s latest missiles and other fearsome hardware along with goose-stepping soldiers in serried ranks. This year, nothing about the nation’s nuclear warheads, much less the “new strategic weapon” that Kim has vowed...

By Francis Turner Vote2 0

Wuhan and the World Feb 10, 2020

Will the current Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic be worse than SARS? And if so what does that do to the world and particularly the world economy? Quick answer is yes, but not a massive pandemic and it'll be bad but not disastrous for most of the globe. The PRC, however is probably in a world of hurt The Virus A big part of the problem is that we really don't know what's happening in Wuhan or even really what happened there. It seems very clear that, despite brave whistleblowers in the medical area, overall the authorities were in denial about the...

By Francis Turner Vote8 0

Brexit Day Has Dawned Feb 1, 2020

It has finally happened. 47 years and one month after the UK joined the EEC, it has quit that body's successor institution, the EU. As someone who often wrote "Unio Europaea Delenda Est" on my former blog I'm glad the UK has left in large part because I hope it will be the start of the entire project unraveling. More importantly, as far as I am concerned, democracy happened. It was a close run thing. The Remainer elites did their best to ignore or overturn the vote, in much the same way that their colleagues in other EU nations had...

By Francis Turner Vote2 1

ChiComs No Have Sense of Humor, Ho Ho Ho Jan 29, 2020

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a totalitarian regime in charge of a country must be in want of a sense of humor. It is likewise a truth that mockery of such regime is how the inmates in the country maintain some kind of psychological health. Hence all the jokes in the Soviet Union about the country and leadership  - "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" for example. The difference is striking: make a joke about the President of the USA in the USA and you'll likely get wild applause (and it doesn't matter whether the...

By Francis Turner Vote4 0

My Experience of Communism Jan 29, 2020

Somewhere on the book of feces I encountered comments that could be summed up by "Communism wasn't that bad and the US is worse for those people at the bottom than communism was". There was also mention of how under communism everyone had a job and housing was free. Since I actually visited the Soviet Union four times in the late 1980s/early 1990s, helped host some Soviet students for a few days in the UK, and also visited other Eastern Bloc countries in 1990, I figure I should probably write down my experiences of how bad communism actually was in...

By Francis Turner Vote20 0

Trumping the NeverTrumpers on Impeachment Dec 19, 2019

Over at Samizdata the following question is asked: [D]oes Trump have a case to answer? Has he done anything illegal and – more to the point – has he done anything wrong? Perhaps even more to the point, has he done anything that other US presidents – Obama for instance – wouldn’t do? I responded there more or less as follows but I wanted to add a bit more to my 'additional thoughts' section than seemed appropriate for a blog comment Did Trump do anything illegal? Technically probably yes. But illegality is not, as far as I can tell, anything...

By Francis Turner Vote2 0

General Election Time Nov 7, 2019

So the turkeys did, finally, vote for Christmas. They had to stick it to Boris and not vote in a large enough number for HIS original bill, but the did then vote to dissolve parliament and hold a general election on the date which he wanted. Boris will take that as a win. Of course large chunks of the remoaner lot are now mocking Boris for not delivering Brexit on October 31. Which is interesting because it is obvious that the only reason he didn't deliver a Brexit (with deal) was that the Remoaner parts of parliament couldn't bear to...

By Francis Turner Vote1 0

Boris Plays a Blinder Oct 18, 2019

They said it couldn't be done, indeed many of them deliberately put roadblocks in the way, but Boris appears to have done what he promised he would anyway. There is a Brexit deal which is far less binding on the UK than the May one and therefore a lot more like an actual Brexit and it will occur on October 31. As Patrick O'Flynn explains in the top link above It is truly remarkable that he has secured an agreement at all given that he was nobbled by the Benn “Surrender” Act, had other traditional prime ministerial prerogatives stripped away...

By Francis Turner Vote3 0

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