timelets

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 04:51:27 GMT

https://chasovschik.dreamwidth.org/2385759.html

Почитал обмен комментариями между Яковом и часовщиком, и подумал, почему MAGA совершенно спокойно или даже с одобрением относится к трамповскому вранью и бреду. Часовщик честно пытается это объяснить, но у него плохо получается, потому что он внутри того самого "понимания" трамповского вранья и бреда.

По-моему, дело в том, что MAGA считает, что принципиально Трамп движется в правильном направлении. Поэтому не так важно, где именно он находится в абсолютных значениях относительно реальности. Главное - направление, а не фактическое положение дел. Все и так ужасно плохо!!!111111

Вот, например, в вопросе смены пола один из трампистов узнает, что Трамп забежал гораздо дальше, чем этот трампист предполагал. https://chasovschik.dreamwidth.org/2385759.html?thread=24061023#cmt24061023
Тем не менее, он не видит в этом ни вранья, ни бреда, потому что с его точки зрения - это всего лишь гипербола, т.е. направление мысли правильное, но совершенно простительно(!), что трамп забегает несколько вперед.

В терминологии Whitehead, трамписты занимаются классификацией проблемы, но ее квантификация им не так важна. Вернее, их субъективная оценка масштаба проблемы уже и так зашкаливает. Поэтому для трамписта не так важно, едят гаитяне собак или нет. Ноль собак или тысяча = это мелкие детали. Важно, что они мешают жить белым людям, поэтому их всех нужно депортировать хоть в Венесуэлу, несмотря на то, что они являются легальными иммигрантами, и их депортация будет прямым нарушением закона, не говоря уже о тысячах разрушенных жизней.

Талант Трампа в умении продавать завышенные оценки ситуации, т.е. делать из мухи слона. Мы это хорошо видели в его книжках, работе на ТВ и в судебных материалах. Как политик он продает ресентимент, который его аудитория готова потреблять в любых количествах. Враньем и бредом чувство ресентимента не испортишь.

===
Приходит трампист в Trump University на прием к онкологу, а тот ему и говорит: у вас четвертая стадия рака. Как же так? - спрашивает ошарашенный трампист, - только вчера была первая.
Вы вывеску TRUMP на здании видели?, спрашивает врач.
Трампист кивает.
У нас свобода слова, говорит врач. Имеем право на гиперболу.
Главное, вы движетесь в правильном направлении.
Пишите завещание.

===
Catastrophising is endemic in the society right now (maybe because of social networking). It would be an interesting research topic to understand how this works in a post-pandemic, climate change, WWIII, AI-will-steal-your-job world.

comments

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 18:08:19 GMT

...the simplicity of the perceptual judgment on which the setting up of the proof culminated is what made the difference and carried conviction. Pasteur was not stinting in the laboratory and outside in concentrating interest and discussion on a few extremely simple perceptual contrasts: ab sence/presence; before/after; living/dead; pure/impure.
...
even if the Pasteurians developed a biology in the laboratory, they did not practice a laboratory biology. They did not leave to others, as apparently happened in England, the job of using or applying their results, contenting themselves with "pure science."

--- BL, TPoF, 1993.

cf. AlphaGo.
( Read more... )

comments

The invention of the glass slipper

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 02:54:30 GMT

“As with all of Perrault’s stories, the trouble with his “Cinderella” is that he took fairy-tale material—either Basile’s or some other “Cinderella” story known to him from oral tradition, or a combination of both sources—freed it of all content he considered vulgar, and refined its other features to make the product suitable to be told at court. Being an author of great skill and taste, he invented details and changed others to make the story conform to his aesthetic concepts. It was, for example, his invention that the fateful slipper was made of glass, which is in no other versions but those derived from his.”

--- Bruno Bettelheim. “The Uses of Enchantment.”

comments

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 06:41:40 GMT

and formal prosecution of Pheidias was made in the assembly. Embezzlement, indeed, was not proven, for the gold of the statue, from the very start, had been so wrought upon and cast about it by Pheidias, at the wise suggestion of Pericles, that it could all be taken off and weighed, and this is what Pericles actually ordered the accusers of Pheidias to do at this time.

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Pericles*.html

By contrast, mail-in vote counting laws adopted by Pensilvania and Georgia legislatures during this election cycle were prone to generate conspiracy theories in a close contest. Florida took care of the problem after the year 2000 recount controversy.

comments

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 23:37:09 GMT

This is really clever:

CO2, a substance found in the breath in large amounts, spreads easily in the atmosphere, so changes in the CO2 concentration are a useful indicator to identify how closed and crowded the space is.

For that reason, the Japan Society for Occupational Health states the CO2 level of 1,000 ppm or lower suggests the room is well ventilated based on the building hygiene control law and other criteria.

Under its recommendation, a room with a reading of higher than 3,500 ppm has an extremely bad ventilation capability, so the facility should not be used as a countermeasure against the novel coronavirus.
..
The measured CO2 concentration is combined with data on the population density and degree of noise, allowing whether the space boasts the three-Cs settings to be determined.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13832094

comments

Dilemma of the Day

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 03:36:03 GMT

when foreseen, it is
easy to remedy them; but if you wait until they approach, the medicine
is no longer in time because the malady has become incurable; for it
happens in this, as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever,
that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to
detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or
treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to
cure. Thus it happens in affairs of state, for when the evils that arise
have been foreseen (which it is only given to a wise man to see), they
can be quickly redressed, but when, through not having been foreseen,
they have been permitted to grow in a way that every one can see them,
there is no longer a remedy.

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1232/pg1232.txt

comments

Fri, 17 Apr 2020 01:59:24 GMT

A good example about the relationship between information and allocation:

“Imagine you’re stepping on a traditional medical scale. It has two weight bars, one with notches at fifty-pound intervals and the other with notches at one-pound intervals. This allows the user to measure their weight down to the pound. What would happen if your doctor used a scale with only one bar with just two notches, one at fifty pounds and one at five hundred pounds, with no way to measure anything in between? Good luck getting medical advice after the person weighing you writes one or the other on your chart. You could only be morbidly obese or severely underweight. It would be impossible to make good decisions about your weight with such a poor model.

The same holds true for just about all of our decisions. If we misrepresent the world at the extremes of right and wrong, with no shades of grey in between, our ability to make good choices—choices about how we are supposed to be allocating our resources, what kind of decisions we are supposed to be making, and what kind of actions we are supposed to be taking—will suffer.”

--- Annie Duke. “Thinking in Bets.”

comments

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 21:43:38 GMT

Pan's mantle, or clothing, is with great ingenuity made of a leopard's skin, because of the spots it has; for in like manner the heavens. are sprinkled with stars, the sea with islands, the earth with flowers, and almost each particular thing is variegated, or wears a mottled coat.

--- Francis Bacon, The Wisdom of the Ancients.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_the_Ancients/2#Chapter_VI

This would be a good illustration of the principle that a difference against a background is a precursor to data.

comments

Quote of the Day: recovering a helmet

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 17:06:47 GMT

“...it was so steep it was thought to be impenetrable. It is on the side of the city that faces Mount Tmolus. It so happened that the day before, Hyroeades the Mardian had seen one of the Lydians climb down at this part of the acropolis and recover a helmet that had tumbled from above. Hyroeades watched him carefully and committed to memory what he saw. Then, the next day, he ascended the height at the same place with other Persians following behind. In this way, when many had made the climb, the acropolis of Sardis was taken and the whole city fell and was sacked.”

--- Herodotus: Histories.

Any helmet recovery attempt should be confidential.

comments

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 00:56:04 GMT

Wow, this thing is huge and expensive.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-and-iran-move-closer-to-military-conflict-after-downing-of-drone-11561076307

comments

Race as optical illusion

Sat, 24 Nov 2018 00:44:12 GMT

“In 1972, Lewontin published these results in a profoundly influential paper entitled “The Apportionment of Human Diversity.” He concluded that racial classifications had become entrenched in Western society thanks to optical illusions. People defined races based on features “to which human perceptions are most finely tuned (nose, lip and eye shapes, skin color, hair form and quantity).” But these features were influenced by only a small number of genes. It was wrong to assume that all the other genes people carried followed the same patterns.”

-- Carl Zimmer. “She Has Her Mother's Laugh.”

If we can identify relevant groups of salient features then we can create new social groups.

comments

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 21:06:10 GMT

The journey to a treatment started in 1949, when a British woman named Mary Jones brought her seventeen-month-old daughter, Sheila, to a Birmingham hospital. Sheila couldn’t stand or even sit up. Nor did she take an interest in her surroundings. A doctor at the hospital named Horst Bickel examined Sheila and informed Jones that she had PKU. “Her mother was not at all impressed when I showed her proudly my beautiful paper chromatogram with the very strong phenylalanine (Phe) spot in the urine of her daughter proving the diagnosis,” Bickel later recalled.
Jones wanted to know what Bickel was going to do now that he had discovered Sheila’s disease. There was nothing to do, Bickel explained.”

Jones rejected his answer. She came back the next morning to demand help. When he turned her down, she came back every morning with the same demand.

--- Carl Zimmer. “She Has Her Mother's Laugh.”

It's a good example to use for some early detection techniques.

comments

TIL: mosquitos prefer pregnant women

Tue, 20 Nov 2018 05:28:09 GMT

Mosquitoes also prefer pregnant women, a fitting prey since only female mosquitoes bite at all out of a need to develop fertile eggs. Pregnant women on average have higher metabolic rates than nonpregnant women. One study found pregnant women exhale 21% more CO2 than their nonpregnant counterparts. Pregnant women are also at another disadvantage: their body temperatures tend to be higher, another mosquito attractor.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-mosquitoes-bite-some-people-more-than-others/

comments

Что делать?

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 20:24:10 GMT

При чтении Дон Кихоте у меня постоянно возникает вопрос: Что делать, когда встречаешься с человеком, который говорит, выглядит и действует, как сумасшедший? Особенно, когда он грозит тебе копьем?

“Don Quixote raised his voice and, striking a haughty posture, declared:

‘You will none of you advance one step further unless all of you confess that in all the world there is no maiden more beauteous than the Empress of La Mancha, the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso.”

The merchants halted when they heard these words and saw the strange figure uttering them, and from the figure and the words they realized that the man was mad; but they had a mind to stay and see what would be the outcome of the required confession and one of them, waggish and sharp-witted, said:

‘Sir knight, we don’t know who this worthy lady is; do let us see her, because if she’s as beautiful as you claim she is, we’ll most freely and willingly confess that what you say is true.’

‘If I were to let you see her,’ retorted Don Quixote, ‘what merit would there be in confessing so manifest a truth? The whole point is that, without seeing her, you must believe, confess, affirm, swear and uphold it; if not, monstrous and arrogant wretches, you shall face me in battle forthwith.”

Miguel de Cervantes. “Don Quixote.”

comments

Quote of the Day: the words we use

Sat, 24 Feb 2018 20:11:52 GMT

They found that people with depression use significantly fewer positive words than those without the condition. Those with depression who are likely to respond to treatment use fewer positive words than those who aren't.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2161725-how-you-speak-predicts-if-psychedelic-therapy-will-help-you/

comments