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 conversation with a friend on a recent Facebook post. A memory of a memory, #academic ghosts haunting the dusty rooms of my brain.
I once spent a very enjoyable afternoon in the #University of #Minnesota #Biostatistics department library reading through century-old bound volumes of #Biometrika, which is now a somewhat obscure #journal, but was in its day instrumental to the development of #statistics. All the great names were there—#Yule, #Pearson, #Fisher, et al.—and it was a clubby little world back then. Everybody who was anybody in statistics knew everybody else.
Just like today, they used a lot of space in their papers refuting each other's papers. But the writing style was completely different, much more personal: many of the papers read more like conversations than the structured, pedantic language of modern journal articles in practically every field. "First I tried this, but it didn't work, so next I ..." "Like I said to so-and-so in a recent letter ..." "According to whosit, such-and-such is true, but frankly, whosit is an idiot."
Well, I recognized what they were doing: forming #cliques and having slow-motion #flamewars. Everything old is new again. Sometimes I wonder if we wouldn't be better off stripping out the modern pretense of detachment.
"When asked by Nature how the papers made it through review, a Sage spokesperson responded that the publisher relies on journal editors to make ind...
It's like a not very bright, but desperately eager to please, high school student trying really hard to follow a teacher's guidelines on how to write an essay. It understands the form well enough, but completely fails to grasp how to produce good content.
For anyone who's wondering about the precise phrasing above: yes, #chronons travel backward in time, while anti-chronons travel forward. Our *perception* of time going forward is created by all the chronons rushing past us in the other direction. It's one of those odd historical naming conventions like #electrons having a negative charge, or an "east wind" meaning air blowing west, that we're stuck with now.
You'd think that with our current understanding of temporal mechanics, we could fix this—but every attempt has failed, often messily. I suspect it was written into the same #Time #Travel #Exemption #Act that keeps #Hitler alive.
@Snowshadow@mastodon.social 🙂
It always fascinates me how #hairstyles in both the distant #past and far #future change, decade by decade and even year by year, at exactly the same rate and in the same way as the present. My #hypothesis is that whenever anyone starts a #historical or #science #fiction #movie production, the #chrononic (or anti-chrononic, as the case may be) #displacement #field sends a signal backward or forward in time to subtly alter reality and keep everything consistent. Otherwise the #universe would fall apart. Trust me, I'm a #scientist.
#Tarbosaurus: "You look so yummy I could just eat you up! Be my valentine?"
#Deinocheirus: "No."
(art by Tuomas Koivurinne)
Real #wolves are fascinating, beautiful, awe-inspiring creatures. #Direwolves were pretty neat too. I really wish people could appreciate the actual animals without feeling the need to mythologize them.
One of my favorite concert memories is of being at an #Einstürzende #Neubauten show when some yob in the audience shouted "set shit on fire!" ... and #Blixa #Bargeld snapping back, "We do not need to set things on fire. We have #Rammstein to do that for us."
@FeralRobots Oh yeah, that was definitely deliberate. 😀 No reason to think raven taxonomists would be any less self-centered than human ones.
@FeralRobots Hah! Could be. I **think** there have been enough experiments on both to show that ravens are smarter, on the whole, but crows are pretty bright too.
Mainly I chose that example because "raven" and "crow" are both names we assign kind of randomly to species in the #Corvus genus: there's no hard and fast rule as to which is which, just a general tendency for birds we call "ravens" to be larger. So I can definitely see some corvid taxonomist creating something like the rather artificial *Pan/Homo* split.
"For example, there’s a good argument to be made that #humans, #chimpanzees, and #bonobos all belong together in one #genus, either #Pan or #Homo. It’s only our desire to see ourselves as something special that causes us to put them in one genus and us in another. If #ravens—probably the smartest **living** #dinosaurs, although some #parrots give them a run for their money—were building a #taxonomy, they’d undoubtedly lump us together with our close relatives. But they might go to great lengths to separate themselves from #crows!"
I like to think I can still turn a nice phrase now and then.
https://dinosaursworld.quora.com/If-Troodon-was-not-real-then-which-dinosaur-was-the-smartest-2
@SoftwareTheron Yeah. I'm quite open in talking about what I went through. Not going to make that decision for other people.
It's been at least a decade since I thought, "I really need a #drink," and a good bit longer than that since the thought was followed immediately by the action. But it's been on my mind much more recently, for reasons it's not my place to discuss, and even if it weren't for those reasons I'm not sure it would ever quite go away. For everyone who will never stop #craving #alcohol or anything else: I will happily help you celebrate every inch of ground you take back and hold.
@Dr_Bombay Maybe this is one of those "two types of people in the world" things. 😀
I get the appeal of climbing #Everest. It’s not something I’ll ever do myself, but if I were younger and richer, I might consider it as a goal. My beloved #mountains here in #Colorado can be plenty challenging, but they aren’t even #foothills to the #Himalayas—more like foothills to the foothills. So yes, I understand the draw.
#Snowboarding down? I don’t get that at all. It’s not #mountaineering, just pointless showboating. I won’t say I’m glad this guy perished in the attempt, but I’m not sorry about it either.
@blazeward7 I need to get back to writing *something*, that's for sure. Something other than tech reports and journal articles, I mean. It's not doing good things for my head.
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
