Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
From a long-ago Facebook post: "#Pirates *generally* aren't scientists. But let's be honest here, what #scientist hasn't at least occasionally looked at the sad state of grant #funding and been tempted to run up the Jolly Roger?"
@FeralRobots, so he *says* ...
It might be the angle, but that looks kind of peaky and heavy-tailed to me. I suspect whoever designed the church adheres to the Leptokurtotic Heresy.
From a recent conversation elsenet:
"Not a fan of the whole #alpha / #beta / etc."
"Not a fan of reality eh?"
"Reality is much more complicated than labeling people by Greek letters. If you really think that kind of thing makes sense, well, have fun with it. Don't expect the grown-ups to play along."
I really need to stick to my vow to stop engaging with these clowns.
Nice overview here. I'm particularly pleased that they acknowledge the uncertainty about what #supercontinent will form next: too many stories present one of the possibilities (usually #Pangaea #Ultima) as a near-certainty. We know for sure that there is at least one more supercontinent in #Earth's future, and probably more, before plate #tectonics stop entirely in a billion years or so. Everything else is informed speculation at best. All this has happened before ...
Performative support for the #Israeli government does not provide cover for welcoming literal #Nazis into the ranks. There’s a lot more to the issue than that, and I do believe there is a significant and disturbing #antiSemitic* strain on the left. But it’s not the blue team that will bring the barbed wire and ovens.
*Everyone knows what “anti-Semitic” means, yes? Okay, good. Moving on.
@FeralRobots Yes, that does seem to follow frighteningly often. 😐
I just encountered the phrase "#conservation of #worship" to describe the way #religious #fundamentalists assume everyone worships *something* just as fervently as they do, and that strikes me as brilliant.
The frantic need to deny that #racism exists in #Europe gets really old sometimes. Absolutely, positively, no doubt the #US is more racist than Europe on the whole. But it’s pretty telling that the only Europeans I’ve ever heard claim that racism isn’t a European problem are those with melanin content as low as mine.
It's a good time to be alive for those of us fascinated by things that no longer are. 🙂 Big #paleontology news today:
1. A new #Tyrannosaurus species. Unlike most of the other proposed new *T. whateveri* of the last few years, this one looks quite well-supported. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-47011-0
2. The earliest skin impressions ever found from any #amniote. Amniotes are #reptiles and #mammals, basically: animals which can lay eggs on land (or give live birth, in more derived forms) because the #embryo is protected from dessication. This is in contrast to #amphibians, the first #vertebrates to live on land, which absolutely require a long-term water source for reproduction. In that sense amniotes are the first **true** terrestrial vertebrates, and we wouldn't be here without those distant ancestors. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)01663-9
The first will no doubt get about a million times more attention, because *Tyrannosaurus*, but the second is at least as big a deal IMO. Links via Thomas Holtz. I'll try to have my own relatively insignificant thoughts when I get time.
Posted for discussion, not for approval. The idea that the way to maintain critical old code is to feed it through an AI which is supposed to convert it to a newer language without any loss of functionality, and expecting it subsequently to be readable and maintainable, strikes me as literally insane.
https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson
There needs to be one of those internet laws to the effect that whenever anyone leads with "technically" or "to be pedantic," whatever they say next will just be wrong.
Skynet has tested our defenses, decided that we're much more useful *without* nuclear extermination, and decided to let things go for now. Carry on.
About that whole "#wolf - #sheep - #sheepdog" thing.
Certain men (almost always) like to think of themselves as #guardians of the flock. The night is dark and full of terrors. They and they alone stand between the innocent sheep, going about their daily business doing sheep things, and the ravening wolves who always lurk in the brush waiting to strike. Let the sheep be happy in their naivete: the sheepdogs are on guard!
I get it, I really do.
When I was a very young man—a boy, really, although I'd have bristled at that word at the time—I raised my right hand and swore an #oath to support and defend the #Constitution and #America and Mom's apple pie against the commie hordes, and damn, I felt good about myself. Honestly, I still do, although I'm not nearly so self-important these days. (Er, I hope.) That oath, and everything that followed from it, did a whole lot to shape who I became, and still am.
No matter how much of a strut that put in my step, I never once would have thought to describe my service with a metaphor that cast me as a different species from the people I swore to defend. My family, my friends, my community, my country: they were *people*, just like me. That was kind of the whole point. For that matter, so were whatever enemies I was defending against.
That's not what bothers me the most about the "sheepdog" thing, though. The much bigger and more immediate problem is what sheepdogs actually do.
See, sheepdogs don't just guard the flock. They also control the flock, a lot more often than they defend it. They *herd* the flock, and any sheep who don't do what the sheepdog wants it to do gets nipped.
Are you comfortable with human societies working that way? Because I'm sure as hell not.
People who convince themselves that their purpose in life is to protect others, who make that the basis of their identities, inevitably end up trying to take control. And when those others reject that control, they react ... badly. They become the thing the "sheep" need to protect *against*.
They're not wolves, or sheep, or dogs. They're just miserable excuses for human beings.
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
