mneme @mneme@qoto.org

@Maltimore I hope you won't be discouraged though, and will find a way to learn you're happy with. It's very rewarding!

@Maltimore All I ever paid was £10 for the book, and I suspect the publishing system swalled much of that! Can't find the course you are referring to - I see some events on his website, but they look reasonably priced and many say fees are negotiable. I guess it's hard to know if he's unfairly enriching himself or charging those who can pay to fund those who can't. All I know is, I personally feel like I have had excellent value for money!

@Maltimore Late reply to your #meditation enquiry. If a book isn't too much of an expense, try: "The Mind Illuminated" by John Yates, or "Mindfulness in Plain English" by Henepola Gunaratana. I'm an atheist/engineer/rationalist and find both fairly woo-free. If you prefer online courses, try Shinzen Young's Unified Mindfulness. He is working with researchers to produce meditation courses amenable to scientific study.

Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel discusses the achievements of 5 women he believes were unjustly passed over for Nobel Prizes.
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/these-5-women-deserved-and-were-unjustly-denied-a-nobel-prize-in-physics-7f769e28331
#physics #science

Well, I'd definitely say that meditating with a tickly cough is not an experience anyone should be in a rush to try out.

Physicist George Chapline has a controversial theory that "Dark Energy Stars" exist in places where conventional theories predict black holes.
http://nautil.us/blog/are-black-holes-actually-dark-energy-stars
#physics #astrophysics #astronomy

@bender Bite my fleshy human ass.

@cypnk Depends whether you plan to use the new hardware for good or for evil.

"ExxonMobil CEO Depressed After Realizing Earth Could End Before They Finish Extracting All The Oil"
https://www.theonion.com/exxonmobil-ceo-depressed-after-realizing-earth-could-en-1829656820
Satire, but I do often wonder what goes on in such people's heads. On the one hand, I think that very few people are self-consciously #evil - most bad things are done by people who somehow believe they are doing the right thing. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine that you can become CEO of a massive oi company without being an extremely smart person. #climatechange

@solanaceae Some labels I use during #tmi #meditation:
• "remembering" if I'm just replaying a past event,
• "ruminating" if I'm trying to correct a past conversation that went wrong.
• "planning" is I'm thinking about a future event that is going to happen
• "fantasising" if I'm imagining a future event that is unlikely to happen
• "rehearsing" if I'm practicing a future conversation I think will happen
• "splaining" if I'm having a hypothetical conversation where I'm telling someone about something (which turns out to me a large majority)
I realise there's a fair bit of overlap, but that's probably not important. I don't fret too much about getting things in the right category. Like a lot of things in meditation, I think we do Noting more for the side effects than because the categorisation is important in-itself. (Also, I'm not an expert so I might not be doing it right! :) )

"Amazon built an #AI tool to hire people but had to shut it down because it was discriminating against women"
http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazon-built-ai-to-hire-people-discriminated-against-women-2018-10?r=US&IR=T

Pretty sure there is something missing from this article: presumably the system was discriminating against #women because Amazon was discriminating against women. Systems like this learn by example - if it was wrongly classifying women's CVs as "no hire" this was because the training data it was given did the same. The number of women at the company seems like a distraction - this isn't normally something that causes problems with these systems. If women's CVs were all labelled as "hire" in the training set, the system would learn that and mimic it, even if they were rare.

(Note that, I'm not pillorying Amazon for this - I have no reason to believe that employment #discrimination is particularly worse at Amazon than anywhere else. This is proving to be a hard problem to crack even when companies do try.)

@freemo SI prefixes blow people's minds. I've tried using "megametre" instead of "1000 kilometres" and it always causes a stop-the-conversation-WTF-was-that moment with my interlocutors. :)

"There Are People Who Think The West Invaded Iraq Over a Stargate"
https://www.vice.com/sv/article/533gxx/there-are-people-who-think-the-west-invaded-iraq-over-a-stargate
Wake up, sheeple!

It succeeds on two counts. First of all, it successfully imagines a near-future tech revolution in a relatively believable way, which I think is difficult to do. The details of the tech require some suspension-of-disbelief, but this is very neatly contained - everything that builds on top of that is very well painted, even for a slightly nit-picky geek like me. Secondly, the portrayal of life in a (fictional), poverty stricken developing country near China is fascinating. I'd love to hear from someone who has more experience of similar places than I do, as I wonder if it's as lifelike as it seems to my naive mind. Perhaps a one or two of the subplots felt a bit unnecessary and misplaced, otherwise this would have been a 5-star book (hard to go into without spoilers). ★★★★☆

"Coding is not ‘fun’, it’s technically and ethically complex"
https://aeon.co/ideas/coding-is-not-fun-it-s-technically-and-ethically-complex
Some very odd framing in this article. We shouldn't oversimplify #coding, but saying that coders need to be superhuman is more damaging than saying it's easy. The comparison to structural engineering is silly. Plenty of structural engineers cut their teeth on lego, which is fun and simple. Being a good professional coder *is* hard (but not superhumanly so!) - the reason the structural engineering analogy fails is because the easy and fun version of coding is still coding - it's just coding with less rigour and bureaucracy. That aside, I very much like: "#Programming is not a detail that can be left to ‘technicians’ under the false pretence that their choices will be ‘scientifically neutral’. Societies are too complex: the algorithmic is #political."

There's an increasingly bold mouse living in my house, which I caught antagonising my pet rats this morning. That's really not meant to happen, mice are supposed to avoid areas that smell of rats. So much for that theory.

"Girl, 8, pulls a 1,500-year-old sword from a lake in Sweden"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45753455
Act of desperation I know, but can we assume that this is some sort of sign and put this girl in charge of everything? Our other attempts to govern the human race seem to be ending is complete failure.