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michaelepley.bsky.social
@michaelepley.bsky.social
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michaelepley.bsky.social
Introduce yourself with four spaceships
NASA concept for an O'Neil cylinder. It shows a large cylinder, kilometers long and a few kilometers in diameter. 3 sets of alternating ground and window sections running the length of the inside surface and wrapping around the cylinder and scene. A ground section at the bottom of the picture shows lush green pastoral landscapes dotted with trees, lakes and streams, farmland and pastures, and wispy clouds above. Through the windows the darkness of space dominates, with a planet and moon visible through the left window section and a close bright yellow star through the window at the top of the picture. This star illuminates the ground section at the bottom. The generation ship from Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Aurora, a fictional account of a failed attempt at colonizing a planet near Earth (~12 lt-yrs). The grey ship is shown in the lower right quarter of the scene as two thick wheels around a thick spine, each wheel connected to the spine with 4 darker spokes. A dark blue and black field, dotted with pinpoint stars and wisps of a cloud like nebula in the distance fills the rest of the picture. The Discovery One spaceship from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a fictional film about a mysterious monolith and it's relationship to mankind's evolution, discovery, conflict, and transcendence. The ship is a light grey sphere, its front dominated by a horizontal illuminated window and 3 round portals before. A structural truss like stalk extends behind and to the left, a small radar dish assembly mounted atop and facing backward. The strut extends to a rounded box-like engine module, though the engines themselves are not visible. Dark black space with thousands of points of white stars fills the background. A whitestar class ship from J Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5, a SciFy TV show about a large space station built by man as a diplomatic outpost to prevent another war after a disastrous first contact. The ship is a flowing grey and purple organic form with a main hull section in the center of the scene horizontal wing amidships and vertical teardrop fin-like structures aft and to the right in the scene. A dark black space fills the rest of the scene, with hundreds of fine points of stars and a blue, purple, and pink diffuse nebula to the upper left.
November 26, 2025 at 4:39 AM
michaelepley.bsky.social
July 2, 2025 at 4:24 PM
michaelepley.bsky.social
Sadly, this first item is a common but egregious error in considering evidence. And it is easy to demonstrate.
Applying Bayesian methods demonstrates how using clothing like a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt as the sole indicator of MS-13 gang membership is highly unreliable, can lead to dangerous and discriminatory profiling, and should not be used in practice. An example calculation of bayes' theorem is shown starting with an assumption of 100 persons in a hypothetical but typical county population of 240,000. Even with generous assumptions, wear a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt as indicators of gang affiliation is deeply flawed. Bayesian analysis allows us to formally update our beliefs based on evidence. And this shows that a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt is a ubiquitous item and provides virtually no meaningful information about an individual's potential gang affiliation.
April 3, 2025 at 12:38 PM