Bungee Jumper

Though a pardon should. And even then...I wouldn't be surprised if the law said that he had to register as a sex offender regardless of pardon.

Why wasn't it 10? Bettman missing a finger?

If chaos broke out to the point that you needed all that other crap to survive...where the hell do you have to go that you need a compass and gps to get there?

What the !@#$ is this mental retardation? You've just spent a hundred pages saying they wouldn't, that they'd regress FROM the population mean and on average have lower scores.

According to a Berkley web page, it still regresses to 140, which is regression toward the mean even though the mean is 100...

Oh, yeah. It hasn't changed since the middle of the Err America thread.

My cats. They can hunt, and they're a ready source of protein in an emergency...

Usually, the letter of the law recognizes sex as consensual if the parties are within two years of age. In most states, a 17-year old wouldn't be convicted for having sex with a 15-year old (or an 18-year old with a 16-year old, for that matter), for precisely the reason you say: most states realize it's BS when you're talking about high-school kids. Apparently, Georgia's different.

Seems reasonable, given the precedent... ...not that the precedent's all that reasonable itself.

For what it's worth, I thought your example was perfectly clear (unrealistic - but you knew that. Perfectly clear nonetheless). Every time I think HA's bottomed out, he gets stupider.

You could take no one's word for it, and calculate it yourself... Oh, wait, that's right. You're too much of a !@#$ing nitwit to calculate it yourself.

Which is a perfectly valid assumption. But as I say in the above post, he keeps confusing that variance with the population variance (more rigorously, he confuses the regression of an individual score with extreme error towards the mean error with the regression of an individual score toward the population mean...just because they're both in the same direction. Which is basically the same as confusing the two distributions...but FAR more idiotic.) What's utterly phenomenal is that, after all this, he still can't see it.

Why do you not understand that just because a given value A regresses toward B which is conicidentally in the direction of another given value C, it does not mean it's regressing toward C? What is your mental deficiency that you don't understand this? You see, "regression" in this context (statistics) has a very specific definition. Again, it has to do with "variance", that pesky little vocabularium you keep ignoring to your detriment (and yes, "vocabularium" is actually a real word.) And "variance" itself has a very specific definition, involving among other things the statistical distribution in which it exists. What you are doing is taking the variance of one distribution and attributing to a completely different distribution, in the mistaken belief that they're equivalent. But they're not...as I keep saying, measurement error and variance are NOT THE SAME THING. Is this sinking in yet? Because after a hundred pages of watching you flounder, I've decided it's finally time to give you just a little hint at what MATHEMATICS is, versus stupid little vignettes from Stanford and Berkely. I've been hoping that just MAYBE you'd stumble across it yourself...but you're bound and determined to remain wilfully ignorant. Not that that'll change with this post either...but you're getting boring. You were much more entertaining when you were varying your bull sh-- explanations between "a rubber band stretches because of error" and "a die has a true value of 3.5" and pretending they meant something.

Fair 'nough. Even if they lose the last two games...looking back, I'd have cut off a finger four months ago to see them finish 7-9. One of Deluca's fingers, of course, not mine...

In FDR's (and Truman's) defense, there wasn't a hell of a lot they could do about the Soviet sphere of influence. The Iron Curtain, at the time, was very literal, in the form of several tens of thousands of tanks. FDR's biggest fault was probably that he looked at winning the war, and not winning the post-war like Churchill and Stalin did. But enough of that. Get back to beating up Jimmah on his ridiculous fiscal nonsense. "Tax breaks cause deficits." Last I checked, spending caused deficits. Spend less, you don't go in to debt. At least, that's the way it works with every single balance sheet I've ever read, from my credit card statements to GM's annual statement...but I confess, I'm not current on the generally accepted accounting principles of wealth redistribution...

Only of the error. In other words, regression of the error toward the mean of the error is caused by the error being normally distributed (or, more accurately, being not evenly distributed). In other words, an individual's error on a set of tests is normally distributed, and that uneven distribution causes extreme amounts of error by the individual to regress on retest to lesser error...but you can't extrapolate that individual performance to the entire population and say "A-ha! It's the individual's error that causes regression toward the average score of the entire population!" like HA is doing. Not the least of which is because anyone who can do simple integration can check that the sum of all the individuals' error over the entire set of individuals is exactly zero; by definition, error CANNOT cause regression toward the mean like HA is misled to believe.

You know what's fascinating? I don't even have to read this to know it's wrong. You keep repeating the same ignorant nonsense over and over, and the response is always the same: regression toward the mean occurs because of statistical variance, and error and variance are not the same thing, and until you can define "variance" (and from that, define "correllation", from which you can define "regression") you don't know what you're talking about. Period. Someone may point out again that we're arguing semantics. We are. Because you continually insist on getting the semantics wrong, and they happen to be important: in getting the semantics wrong, you're confusing two different distributions, and attributing the behavior of one distribution to the other (or even dumber: somehow believing that the two distributions are dependent when they're completely independent). But like I've been saying: you're too much of an idiot to twig to any of this.

Very. Thanks, Kevbeau.

Actually, that was entirely unlike a Monte Carlo simulation. Not that it's the least bit surprising that you don't know what one of those is, either. And you've consistently called it "regression toward the mean", which is wrong. And you've specifically said "regression toward the mean is caused by error", which is wrong. Which means either you've been consistent...and wrong. Or you've been inconsistent...and still wrong. Either way, you're an idiot. I explain it because IT'S NOT MATH. Again, do the math. Link to math. Relate the math to what the articles say (but skip the Berkely article; as I've said multiple times, it's crap. It's almost as stupid as you are.) This is why you keep devolving into semantic arguments: you refuse to discuss THE MATH. Explain what your linked articles mean...using MATH. I've only been encouraging you for several hundred posts already...but you still can't, because you don't know what "variance" is, or why it's important, or why it's not the same as "error". And this is hardly the only point you're confused on, by the way. I'm still sitting on about eight more egregious errors you've made. There's just no point in discussing them when you still don't know the basics.

No, you originally said regression toward the mean was caused by error. Then you changed your story four times. Then you linked to stuff you still don't understand, because you still don't know the math (if you did, you'd be using mathematical terms like "variance", and "correllation" - terms that, unlike "luck" and "error", actually do explain regression toward the mean). And that is why you're still wrong, and still an idiot. You can't relate your non-mathematical examples to reality. All you've been doing is parroting other people's writing without any insight whatsoever into what it means. Anyone can parrot other people. It takes actual knowledge to do the math and figure these things out for yourself - which is well within the capabilities of myself and MANY people here, most notably NOT including yourself. Never mind the fact that, if you did understand any of it, you'd realize that you've actually proven your original conjecture of a eugenics program to be completely impossible. But again, that would require understanding the math.

Particularly when the guy he'd be chasing - Nichols - is already in the locker room...

No. It's about what the press told him to feel. Didn't you read his post?

My point is: if he's convinced his orders are illegal, he's trying to weasel out of responsibility for avoiding them. Basically, he's trying to avoid taking a stand. Either it's an illegal war, or it's legal. Seems to me he's trying to say "Well...it's illegal...but I don't believe that strongly enough to completely not support it....so can I just sort-of not support it?" That's cowardly, not having conviction in his beliefs.

I'm not disputing the quotes from Stanford or anyone (save Berkely, which was really weird). They all say exactly what I've been saying: excessive error will regress to the mean OF THE ERROR. I'm disputing your interpretation of them, that it represents regression to the population mean. It doesn't. You don't understand the difference between error and population variance. Hell, you don't even understand the difference between an individual and a population, apparently. And you still don't understand what that effect means: it means, simply, that you've arbitrarily picked a sample with high net error. Period. That's why I called it a completely fictitious effect earlier - becaues it only exists if you specifically look for it. In the limit of an entire population, it doesn't mean a damned thing. But unless you are saying now that this is NOT regression toward the population mean, you're still wrong. And if you're saying that now...you're trying to weasel out of your earlier idiot statements.

I'm sorry...you lost me at "improbable". Neither of the next two games is against pushovers. Particularly Baltimore. You make it sound as though 7-9 would be a complete disappointment after achieving 7-7...after going 2-5 in the first 7. So I guess the answer to your question is: yes, I would.