Blondə

I’m going to hazard a guess it’s a combination of falling budget and an over reliance on autocorrect. If it’s like other industries, they’re trying to get more articles out with fewer people.

I know that I often have an atrocious number of typos - but some are entirely the fault of autocorrect either changing a correct word to something else or correcting a typo to a word that makes no sense in the context of the sentence. I’m hoping that the next generation will improve this.

If anything a now - not typo at least indicates that it was written by a human. LLM errors generally don’t involve that sort of thing.

It is true. It came out a while ago. It was just entered into testimony. I didn’t actually read her statements and answers, so I don’t know what level of detail she went into, but it was in her book and she talked about it at the time.

I do this for a living. Seasonality as a generic term refers to temporally periodic signals but can even be extended to talk about non-temporal aspects of a signal. The same math used in areas like econometrics to remove periodicity in annual data can be applied to multiple domains. The main motivation to removing or isolating periodicity is to allow for investigation into the underlying phenomena, or to allow the investigation of the sources of periodicity independently of other drivers. In every case, though, seasonality is an acceptable term in everything I’ve written, read, and worked on.

Archie, gopher, wais, Usenet, Telnet, and ftp were the internet at that point. The www was basically a guy with a fan page for the hobbit and someone who gave a virtual tour of MIT.

This is seasonality.

Seasonality is a characteristic of a time series and refers to periodic and generally regular and predictable changes that occur over a year.

To make it more generic, drop the “over a year” and just refer to the periodic signal over time idea. You can find additional signals by how you bin the data, eg monthly or day of week.

In the books, Isildur turned invisible by putting on the ring, and dove into a river to escape a band of orcs. The ring, under its own will, slipped from his finger and he was spotted by orcish archers, who killed him.

I’ve always thought that the “invisibility” aspect of the ring was that it shifted the wearer into the shadow realm. The Nine were invisible without their cloaks, but were visible when the ring was worn. It also made the wearer more visible to Sauron, iirc.

If that’s the case, then the power granted by the ring might mean that magic users (such as Gandalf or Galadriel) would more easily draw on power from the other realm into this one.

There’s entire branches of research on this, but I think one of the easiest ways to approach it for starting out is to think of the word “womanly.”

having or denoting qualities and characteristics traditionally associated with or expected of women.

I would strike the word “traditionally” from that definition since we’re talking about a comparative and differential analysis and concentrate on the “qualities and characteristics” part. Although most people in the US today wouldn’t think of it this way, imagine the perception of a woman army officer commanding male troops in 1845. You can take the same approach when looking through history or across cultures. What roles, qualities, and characteristics are associated with “women” and how do they differ and evolve?

There’s some complexity when you get into the details - indigenous cultures change when they come into contact with, say, colonialism, and the people who studied them might themselves be observing through their own prejudices. History is replete with examples of British colonialists being unable to properly deal with things like the egalitarian democracies of the northern indigenous peoples or the matriarchal social structures. Picture the used car dealership where the salesman still insists on engaging with the man even though it’s the woman buying the car.

Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, and semiotics is the study of symbology. When we’re talking about these things, we’re talking about how the ideas and symbols associated with the idea-token “woman” differ.

The reason why this is important is that this is the crux of the transphobic argument. Their argument is cultural, not biological (although like I said, even their biology is sketchy).

I think a great study that includes cross cultural anthropological analysis of the role of women, as well as politics and economics, is David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything.

Biologist here. The main problem with this argument is that Rowling is trying to win her argument through scientizing, and is not only doing it in an inept way, but in a way that’s completely ironic.

She’s invoking biology, but infortunately she’s adopting an approach that incorporates a high school level of biology. When we start teaching science, we start with highly simplified presentations of the major topics, then build both in breadth and depth from there. If you really want to get down the rabbit hole of sex determination (and multiple definitions of genetic and phenotypical “sex”), you really need to get into molecular biology, genetics, and developmental biology. She’s been advised of this multiple times by multiple experts, so at this point it’s willful ignorance.

The painfully ironic part is that she’s relying on an area where she has no expertise in order to make her point, while ignoring the fact that, as a world-known literary figure, she should know that the applicable part of the definition of “woman” is linguistic and semiotic - which is to say it’s cultural. The definition of “woman” was different in the 1940s South, among the 17th century pilgrims, the Algonquin tribes, cultures throughout sub-equatorial Africa, and so on.

Lemmy is small enough that “brigading” doesn’t feel entirely appropriate. Maybe “platooning?”

In any case, we know from other sites that downvotes increase the probability of getting more downvotes, and nasty comments increase the probability of getting more nasty comments. The same goes for upvotes and positive comments. It’s just social dynamics. Some subs on reddit existed almost exclusively to call out other subs, but I think that Lemmy’s user base is small and spread out enough that it’s not a major contributing factor in voting.

I think it’s mostly just people scrolling along, running across a hot take, and interpreting it according to the voting.

In any case, I would suspect that people would be more impacted by hurtful comments than downvotes.

Evolutionary biologist here. I’d argue that, in the same sense as we see homosexuality in animals, we see trans animals.

Some animals physically transition - there are fish that will change their physical gender based on the current gender mixture in their local environment. Some behaviorally transition, with males taking on female roles. Sometimes a whole species is trans - like the female hyena developing male appearing genitalia.

Sexual orientation in the animal kingdom is not strictly analogous to that among humans (which has a much stronger social construct), and the same is true of gender (that is, human gender is a social construct). Because the range of adaptations are so diverse and so widespread, I’m very sure of the fact that they have different causes from each other as well as from humans, but the same is true of animal sexuality.

All too often, taking the “evil” path in RPGs just locks content. Most of the NPCs end up against you and you lose side quests rather than getting additional ones to compensate.

I think the Elder Scrolls games did well with the Thieves’ Guild and Assassins. There was a fair amount of content that was unlocked, and depending on your playstyle (and how much you roleplay in single player RPGs) you could still do major quest lines.

It’s just that, after decades of playing computer RPGs, I will tend to default to an paladin type character until I get the lay of the land.

I can’t say what their corporate culture is like now, but they’ve had a pretty poor reputation in the past, including the notion that the lowest performing 10% should be fired every year. The Amazon folks I’ve known have been great people - not at all the Gordon Gecko types you’d imagine from that - but culture in large corporations varies a lot by the team you’re in.

I came up with a saying back in the 90s when I was doing the startup scene - “Do you want it right, or by Tuesday?” Sometimes they do indeed need it by Tuesday. More of the time they have no idea why you need the extra days to get it right. But it’s really important for those in a leadership position - whether they’re managers or senior engineers - to push back and set expectations.

Uno Reverse

This was possibly the most offensive episode from TNG.

I have pushed back hard on the idea that the Ferengi are space Jews (the Bajorans are space Jews, the Cardassians are space Nazis). The Ferengi are space capitalist Americans - Riker even called them “yankee traders.”

I’ve defended, somewhat, the sexist aspects of TOS by saying it was the 60s and they were trying. They probably did more good than bad.

I know that LGBT-phobia (or concerns about it) made them back off on how Garak was played. I know the Troi stuff ranged from cringe to rape culture, and I know that having Riker being neo-Kirk with the ladies was… a choice.

But the Irish episode was the closest thing to blackface I’ve seen on Trek. I can’t even watch that episode.

I fully agree with you on your response. My attempt at being brief (as a perusal of my post history will show I have a really hard time with), I sacrificed accuracy for brevity.

And just in case you’re hitting your weekend and bored, I am also able to have a full scale discussion on the semiotics of pick up trucks and the surrounding culture in general.

I can give you my impression and that of the people I spoke to about it. I’m coming from the perspective of a theoretical biologist who was heavily involved with computational models of complex systems - particularly ones with biological foundations. I worked with simulations ranging from molecular cell biology up to ecosystems.

I don’t want this to sound dismissive, but CA are cartoonishly simple versions of complex systems. Once you get past illustrating the idea that simple rules can give rise to complex behaviors, that they’re Turing complete, and that there are neat and interesting phenomena that can arise, I think you’re pretty much done. They’re not going to show you anything about the evolutionary dynamics that drive carcinogenesis. They’re not going to let you explore the chemistry that might have given rise to the origin of life. They’re not going to let you model how opinions and behaviors cascade on social networks.

Topics like emergence are core to complexity theory, but CA can only illustrate that it exists, and it does so in such an abstract way that it doesn’t really translate into an understanding of how emergence is grounded in real world systems.

Wolfram’s problem, in my opinion, is that he was largely disconnected from the complex adaptive systems community, and for some reason didn’t realize we had largely moved on. I don’t know anyone in the CAS community that thought his work was groundbreaking.

I do have to say that Robert Sapolsky seems to have found his work interesting, and I am very deeply interested in Sapolsky’s work. But he’s a neurobiologist, not a complexity scientist, and he doesn’t draw a concrete connection between Wolfram’s work and his own, other than the generic connection that complex systems can arise from simple rules. That’s something we’ve known since Conway and Lorenz.

My mind is open to counter arguments, but that was my impression and as far as I could tell, the same was true of my colleagues. I think that the general academic reception to his book bears this analysis out. It’s like if someone wrote a comprehensive book about all kinds of Prisoner’s Dilemma models long after we’ve moved on from PD to modeling more complex and accurate depictions of cooperative versus competing interactions. Students should absolutely study PD, and they should study CA. It’s just not something you want to hang your academic hat on at this point.

Mathematica, on the other hand, is pretty neat.

He absolutely did not invent CA. His book was published well after it had become an established modeling technique. Conway’s game of life was published in 1970. Complexity theory modeling had moved well past CA by the time Wolfram’s book came out, to the point that most of us didn’t know why he bothered writing it, much less thought it would revolutionize science.

Several US states have requirements on a minimum bumper height and restrict things like how far tires can extend from the wheel well.

There is scientific consensus - to the point of being unanimous as far as I know - that these raised vehicles pose a significantly increased danger to pedestrians and to other vehicles. There is entirely a legal precedent to pass laws that say things like bumpers can be no more than six inches from the ground and that driver visibility must be cleared to within a foot of the front bumper.

In the US, these issues are largely handled at the state level, although there are some federal regulations in place. When I was a teenager in Jersey, they required annual inspections that included testing for operational lights, braking efficiency, emissions, and so on. In New Mexico, there were no inspections at all, and you simply had to pay for registration.

As these quasi-monster trucks become more prevalent, there’s an increasing need for legislation. Manufacturers are driven solely by consumer demand unless regulated, and politicians are more worried about upsetting Dodge Ram drivers than they are about public health and safety. I literally could not imagine a nationwide 55MPH law passing today (there were complications with doing it when they did do it, but it was successfully executed when it happened).

What we need is this generation’s Ralph Nader to go after the industry to get the public to support and demand political action.

Yes. These should be made illegal, or restricted from on-road use. As trucks increase in size and height, there are studies that they become more and more dangerous. They should be banned for safety reasons.