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Yes, citing these in an argument will annoy everyone. But what fun!
100 Little Ideas that Explain how the Human World works.
"Bizarreness Effect: Crazy things are easier to remember than common things, providing a distorted sense of “normal.”
Nonlinearity: Outputs aren’t always proportional to inputs, so the world is a barrage of massive wins and horrible losses that surprise people.
Moderating Relationship: The correlation between two variables depends on a third, seemingly unrelated variable. The quality of a marriage may be dependent on a spouse’s work project that’s causing stress.
Denomination Effect: One hundred $1 bills feels like less money than one $100 bill. Also explains stock splits – buying 10 shares for $10 each feels cheaper than one share for $100.
Woozle Effect: “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.” - Daniel Kahneman."
Substackers Against Nazis
Today, December 14, 2023, a group of Substack publishers (also known as creators or writers) sent an open letter to the founders of Substack by publishing it in their individual newsletters. After salutations, the letter begins, "According to a piece written by Substack publisher Jonathan M. Katz and published by The Atlantic on November 28, this platform has a Nazi problem. ... We, your publishers, want to hear from you on the official Substack newsletter. Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success? Let us know—from there we can each decide if this is still where we want to be. Signed, Substackers Against Nazis."
Scott Pilgrim vs. The December Comfort Rewatch
"All the absurdity and chaos works, because, let’s face it, one’s early 20s are mostly absurdity and chaos anyway."
MeFi's own JScalzi on his enduring affection for the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World movie.
Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)
"People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. [...] Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus."
Conservationists are working to protect the creature behind bunyips
Conservationists are working to protect the creature behind bunyip folklore. One night well over a century ago three miners headed to Hexham Swamp, between Newcastle (in Australia) and Maitland, for an evening of wild duck hunting. But instead of finding ducks, they came across a terrifying creature with a tremendous roar "like that of a lion" and two eyes like "golden orbs in the night". And so, the legend of the Hexham bunyip was born. That infamous night in 1879 may have become a local legend, but today this swamp creature is now rarer than ever and residents are trying to save it from extinction.
It turns out the mysterious creature that scared the three miners in 1879 was a bird; the endangered Australasian bittern, also known as the 'bunyip bird'.
“Oh, have we decided it’s 1993 again? I guess I didn’t get the memo.”
If unchecked markets worked as well as Andreessen insists, we wouldn't be in this mess. The most powerful people in the world are technological optimists. They asked for our trust in the 90s, the 00s, and the 10s. They insisted that all we needed to do was clap louder. We clapped. They failed. We grew less trustful. - On Marc Andreessen's "techno-optimist manifesto"
Seeking more weirdo’s hoards of treasures
My absolute favorite genre of museum/attraction is ”eccentric rich person’s oddly sorted collection of items related to their special interest(s).” I just spent part of today at the Mercer Museum and had an amazing time. What other museums, historic homes, or other attractions anywhere in the world might scratch a similar itch?
I don't think that's coincidence.
"I propose it has consequences to democracy how available to the public are their laws, their policies, their judicial decisions, their holy texts, and even their academic papers about literature. The W3C spent decades insisting in utter folly that they were right in their conception of how ordered lists work, in the face of the whole world, and in doing so they frustrated the transparency on which democracy rests."
“Sometimes, you need a little help from a higher algorithm.”
‘Mrs. Davis’ Versus AI: Here’s What Happened When ChatGPT Interviewed Damon Lindelof, Tara Hernandez and Betty Gilpin
She is stardust, she is golden
Joni Mitchell Returns to the Stage, Golden, Glorious and in Control
| A crowd of more than 20,000 on Saturday night at the scenic Washington venue the Gorge Amphitheater got to experience Joni Mitchell's first ticketed live performance in more than 20 years. And it was indeed glorious.
sometimes, it *is* lupus
After a traumatic experience in college, April Burrell was catatonic for twenty years. She was diagnosed with a severe form of schizophrenia which did not respond to treatment.
“She was the first person I ever saw as a patient,” said Sander Markx, director of precision psychiatry at Columbia University, who was still a medical student in 2000 when he first encountered April. “She is, to this day, the sickest patient I’ve ever seen.”
Maybe it isn’t Picasso
“You know, everybody’s taste in art is different. But that’s not the point.” When the Neighbors Don’t Share Your Vision (And Your Vision Includes Giant Transformer Statues). [NYT gift link]
Inside Snopes: the rise, fall, and rebirth of an Internet icon
FastCompany's Chantel Tattoli looks at the troubled history of what used to be everyone's favorite "debunking" site
"In the early ’90s, shortly before he helped think up Snopes, the first (and favorite) website for fact-checks, and way before he was banished from the very thing he’d helped build, David Mikkelson was quite a character on message boards. He wasn’t looking for love necessarily, but it found him nonetheless..."
A Song Led Them Home
The Language You Cry In
traces how a song preserved over generations of women was able to lead a family back to its pre-slavery roots in Sierra Leone. In 1933 a linguist recorded Amelia Dawley singing a song that had been passed on long enough for its meaning and language to have been forgotten. Researchers recognized the language as a dialect spoken only in southern Sierra Leone. It would still take decades of time and the efforts of Amelia's daughter Mary, Baindu Jabati in Sierra Leone, who had preserved a similar song, and the collaboration of multiple scholars for the origins of the song -- a death hymn -- to be fully uncovered.
Don't miss your shingles shots
The shingles vaccine was rolled out in Wales in 2013, using an exact birthdate cutoff: people born on or after Sept 2, 1933 were eligible, while those born earlier weren’t. The cutoff created a nifty opportunity to test the hypothesis that herpesviruses, including the VZV that causes chickenpox and shingles, are causal to Alzheimer's dementia.
Kramer’s Dream
From David Friedman’s Ironic Sans newsletter, a small collection of URLs you can use to stop getting (a bunch of) junk mail (in the US).
Living sound forever: The genius of Wendy Carlos
Xtra Magazine profile of electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos
by Kristen S. Hé
strangers doing silly things together
I think the best most human thing in the world is strangers doing a silly thing together
A short Tumblr post by calamitys-child lists a few examples, such as "very tiny girl at the pharmacy interviewing everyone in the queue and every single one of us in turn sat down and answered this toddler's questions like we were on Letterman".
Movie: Bartleby
A manager (David Paymer) hires a strange employee (Crispin Glover) who, at first, is exceptionally efficient but then begins to reply to any request with "I would prefer not to." An adaptation of Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" told in the setting of a modern office.
"he’s really quite good-looking for a guy in his 40s."
Someone sent Slate's 'How to Do It' column a barely disguised Star Trek: DS9 plot synopsis:
The Wife I’m a Surrogate for Wants Me to Spend More Time With Her Husband. That’s a Very Bad Idea.
I’m a 21-year-old woman, and I’m seven months pregnant at the time of writing this. My boyfriend is on deployment, and while he was away, I decided to surrogate for a couple that lives in the area. The money is better than anything I could make otherwise, and part of the contract I signed meant that I moved in with “Miles” and his wife, rent-free and for much nicer accommodations than I could find on the market.
The couple I’m carrying for is super sweet and some of the friendliest people I’ve ever met, which is starting to turn into a problem. I’m sure it’s just a combination of pregnancy hormones, my boyfriend being away, and having a little too much free time, but I’ve found myself fantasizing about Miles. It doesn’t help that his wife, “Keiko,” keeps pushing us to spend more time together when she’s not hanging out with me. Nothing overtly sexual has happened, but sometimes he does this thing where he rubs my ankles (the swelling’s bad), and it just feels so unbelievably good. In my more rational moments, I can tell that this is very definitely a Bad Idea. But I’m living in his house, and he’s really quite good-looking for a guy in his 40s. And a few times I’ve “let my hands slip” to rub at his shoulders or chest. He always gently asks me to stop after a moment, but I know I’m on the verge of losing control here. How do I stop thinking about this guy?
The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small
It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. From Kelsey McKinney, writing for Defector.
Education and Censorship in the US
Children's author Maggie Tokuda-Hall lost a deal with Scholastic to license her book about love and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II because Scholastic (the world's largest book publisher and distributor of children's literature) requested that she remove the mention of racism in her author's note. Scholastic, after the public outcry, has apologized and offered to restart the conversation with her. Meanwhile, book challenges and bans of "woke" material continue to proceed at an alarming rate in the US.
Spanish woman emerges into daylight after 500 days living in cave
"Didn't want to come out": Spanish woman emerges into daylight after 500 days living in cave as part of a research project. Beatriz Flamini, an elite sportswoman, celebrated two birthdays in the 70-metre-deep cave, having gone in before the war on Ukraine started and the Queen's death.
The Chronoscope: Time Travel with Maps
Chronoscope World is a time machine to explore the history of the world by browsing maps dating back to 14th century B.C. More than 4,200 high-resolution maps can be displayed in a maps application on the correct geo location.
You can just browse the world map or browse cities of the world.
Here's San Francisco with 4 historical maps overlaid on the current city.
Here’s Amsterdam with 10 historical maps. Hint: The slider on the right controls the transparency of the overlaid map.
The site also includes special projects such as mapping the travels of Alexander Humboldt
Want an overview? The site's creator made a short video.
Here's San Francisco with 4 historical maps overlaid on the current city.
Here’s Amsterdam with 10 historical maps. Hint: The slider on the right controls the transparency of the overlaid map.
The site also includes special projects such as mapping the travels of Alexander Humboldt
Want an overview? The site's creator made a short video.
You are not a parrot
And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this.
…“intelligent” according to what definition? The three-stratum definition? Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences? The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale? Bender remains particularly fond of an alternative name for AI proposed by a former member of the Italian Parliament: “Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences.” Then people would be out here asking, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”
The final act of Worf, the Star Trek legend who deserved one most of all
What Worf Really Meant to Star Trek Legend Michael Dorn [Polygon]
““They really didn’t have a bible for Worf at all,” says Dorn of those early episodes. “In fact, one of the first things I did was, I asked the producers, ‘What do you want from this guy? You’ve just handed me a piece of paper that says Worf on it.’” With Roddenberry’s blessing, Dorn set out making the character his own, giving Worf the kind of personal investment and attachment that only an actor can provide. “I decided to make the guy the opposite of everybody else on the show. You know, everyone else, their attitudes were great, and they’re out there in space, relationships are forming. And after every mission they were like, Wasn’t that fantastic? I didn’t say anything to anybody, I just made him this gruff and surly character on the bridge. No smiles, no joking around.””Dorn has swapped his mek’leth for a kur’leth and glued on his bumpy prosthetic forehead once more to reprise the role of Worf in the final season of Star Trek: Picard, which reunites the Next Gen cast for one last adventure. It’s the chance to give one of sci-fi’s most beloved supporting characters something that’s usually reserved only for Captains and Admirals: a glorious third act.
"Intent is far less important than impact when it comes to apologies"
An interview with the authors (podcast with transcript) of Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies, by Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy. Ingall and McCarthy also created the site SorryWatch which analyzes apologies from celebrities, politicians, and more. Step 4 to a good apology (pop up window): "Be VEEERY CAAAREFUL if you want to provide explanation; don’t let it shade into excuse." Ingall on teaching kids how to apologize.
Consider these autistic-friendly options
How to design autistic-friendly games [gamesindustry.biz]
As the games industry slowly becomes more aware of accessibility needs, efforts to account for neurodiversity have been limited. As part of the GamesIndustry.biz Academy, we previously addressed understanding and supporting neurodiversity, including autism, in the workplace, as well as the fact that accessibility isn't rocket science.
“"There's the kind of desire to throw all the accessibility options in [but] that in itself can be overpowering and not a good thing to do," Alison says. "So you won't find every option that you can think of in our game. The ones that are there are there because they've been thought through specifically [at] every single stage that we [went] through. A huge control centre... That's too much in itself, potentially, for an autistic person. So it's not overwhelming them at any stage, even if that's at the accessibility options stage."”This article is an attempt at bridging the gap between these two topics, giving pointers about how to account for neurodiversity in-game, and more precisely how to make your game more accessible to players on the autism spectrum.
The Lathe of Heaven
Kelly Link in Praise of Ursula K. Le Guin's Genuine Magic
- "It is also, notably, Le Guin's deliberate foray into Philip K. Dick's territory, with its hallucinatory beginning, its drug-using protagonist, and its surreal, literally world-melting alternate realities. Dick and Le Guin were admirers of each other's work and occasional correspondents."
PSA: do not use services that hate the internet
As you look around for a new social media platform, I implore you, only use one that is a part of the World Wide Web.
If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way.
Consign that app to oblivion.
It sounds like it ought to be an English word
Lyre's Dictionary
generates new English words based on existing roots and patterns. I found it through its Mastodon bot but it also has a Twitter bot (for now) and an RSS feed.
We knew this was coming 😭
From the creator of Best of Nextdoor comes Best of Dying Twitter, a chronicle of the bird site's current Elon Era.
While Best of Dying Twitter retweets some informative threads (Threadreader links here and here), most of the account is devoted to the lulz.
Goldfish learned how to drive during about a dozen 30-minute lessons.
In a new experiment, six goldfish learned to drive a tank of water on wheels around a room.
This feat of steering suggests that fishes’ navigational abilities hold up even on land. Illustrated by cartoonist JoAnna Wendel as part of the Wild Things series for Science News Explores.
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