Lindsey Graham was McCain's sidekick. I think we all remember the iphone pinata during the 2016 campaign.
On the plus side, Senator Graham is now in favor of a border wakk.

A “Border” wakk sounds like an improvement on the original idea.

I LOL'd

Sometime back, we were discussing Trump as Damien Thorn. Indeed, it turns out that, numerologically speaking, "2019" has some interesting properties. One is that it's an apocalyptic power , which means that 2 raised to the 2019 power contains 666. That and other amusing facts (including a special tr...

Re "no more stupid wars". Hey -- if it's on the Internet, it must be true.  

Hey don't knock it: Trump leaves the country, the DJI goes up 1000 points!

I think a lot of what has been going on in the stock market is correcting now-perceived over-valuation in the tech sector. Amazon is a wonderful company, but not worth [$]\infty[$]. Yes, there's a correction multiplier due to stronger recession signally coming from the bond market. But, fundamentall...

My rule of thumb (from pg 157 of my second book) is that US markets are feeling highly stressed and have a systematic issue when VIX gets over 40. We closed at 36 today.  Mnuchin checks again on Weds:  "Sir, I've talked again to all the big banks like you asked, and they all say you've creeped out t...

What could possibly go wrong? bipartisan, one dem, one GOP It's a valid issue, how should cryptocurrencies be regulated, if at all? As securities? And, perhaps most notably, under the bill’s definition, a digital token “is not a representation of a financial interest in a company, including an owne...

Paying twice for what? If Krauthammer wanted amnesty in exchange for border security, that was the Reagan-era deal. One side (amnesty) has already been delivered, and we're just waiting for the dems to keep their promise and put the other side (border security) in place. OK, I sort of get your poin...

There were a follow up paper in 1988 in ACM Trans Math Soft but don't know if it included a proof about (19).

Thanks -- couldn't tell either. But found proofs by other authors here

I read Aluffi et al 1985. The ODE solver converges when the function minimum is unique but it is somewhat of a leap-of-faith IMO to consider a 'suitable stochastic perturbation' (what's the ratonale?) that will find the global solution in some magic way. No, they give the strong impression the meth...

Re your MM question, you have to remember that Mathematica is really a black box in terms of algorithmic details. I don't use DE that much --  mostly as a double check that some local extremum I have found, say for maximum likelihood, is actually a global optimum.   DE is a submethod of its global o...

Got it -- thanks! Suspect ppauper wouldn't quite phrase it that way, but in the absence of a counter-post, I'll assume you're right about the gist of it. 

maybe not 

Paying twice for what?

that's the deal that Reagan went along with: regain control of the border in exchange for an amnesty. It was supposed to be done in two parts, the amnesty first followed by securing the border. Yeah, but Krauthammer addresses that problem. He switches the order and proposes a neutral judicial commi...