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190 results for “marick”
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Similar (in a much more consequential way) to my changing my avatar to be the Canadian flag: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuentes_de_Andaluc%C3%ADa
"A surprisingly gut-wrenching decision (putting the Canadian flag as my avatar)” https://mstdn.social/@marick/117187421571532999
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I guess I should add “have a @Spoofer3” to my list of necessary accompaniments to the tolerable life. https://mstdn.social/@marick/117232079787283268
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Consider process/management/efficiency directives. Don’t they say to you “What need one?” Should your response be to have the third of your life at work further constrained? Or…?Should you have the freedom of choice of a bird that weighs 3 grams?
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Lear’s response is:O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s.In Mrs. Hummingbird (I like to think), we see the same attitude. Sure it would be more efficient to perch, but I’m a goddamn hummingbird! Hovering is our thing! And I’ll burn extra calories to do it, thank you very much.
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GONERIL Hear me, my lord.
What need you five-and-twenty [knights], ten, or five,
To follow in a house [hers] where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?They’ve been relentlessly converting him into a pet, and his daughter Regan delivers a line that just *lands*:
REGAN What need one?
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… Notice that Mrs. Humster sometimes perches to drink nectar and sometimes hovers when she could perch. Why? Hovering has got to require more energy. Shouldn’t she be maximizing her caloric expenditure.
Then I remembered one of the key sections from “King Lear” (my favorite Shakespeare play). It’s Act 2, Scene 4. Lear now lives with one or another of his daughters. He has brought with him a bunch of rowdy and obnoxious knights. His daughters want him to get rid of them:
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I send videos of hummingbirds to Dawn while she’s away. I think this video has a lesson about process or methodology. First, the video:
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For me, the experience of listening to jazz is like being a little kid eavesdropping at the adults’ table. I just don’t know enough to really understand, but understanding is tantalizingly close. I can grasp the edges of what’s going on, and that’s enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI2fJcJ1a7k&list=RDiI2fJcJ1a7k
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Today I learned that the canine distemper virus is related to the measles virus. https://virological.podigee.io/55-31-canine-distemper-the-dog-virus-that-threatens-whole-species It’s nastier than measles (higher fatality rate). Causes me to wonder how many people vaccinate their dogs but not their children.
A classmate of Dawn’s who went into small animal medicine tells her that the antivax movement is definitely visible in her practice. (1/2)
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I wonder how it is in large animal practice. One of the things that Dawn liked about working with farmers is that they’re more pragmatic, less emotional, than pet owners. But the latest antivax movement seems strongest in rural/Republican areas. (2/2)
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OK, I checked. The American colonists did have some rifles, which they could easily extrapolate to the machine gun and then have a fixed opinion about where on the spectrum of automaticity an AR-15 with a bump stop lies.
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Bonus points if MechaYeomanFarmer(1800) frequently answered “How the hell could I have an opinion on X? There is no remotely comparable experience in the lives of anyone alive today! Grow up and think for yourself.” -
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And think of the possibilities for constitutional jurisprudence. Whenever Thomas or Alito justify their foregone conclusions with interpretations of quotes cherry-picked by clerks and writers of amicus briefs, the dissent could ask MechaYeomanFarmer(circa-1800) what the “original public understanding” of regulating semi-automatic rifles would have been in the age of muskets.Thomas and Alito scorn professional historians, but how could they scorn MechaYeomanFarmer? It’s AI!
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Even better would be “Take this question, posed in modern English, translate it into 1833 English, provide the mediocre answer generated from the scraped corpus up to that date, and also translate it back into modern language. With footnotes highlighting when meanings have changed (especially subtly) to facilitate further questions.
Or is either already possible? (3/3)
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For reasons unclear even to me, I’m reading a history of De Morgan’s logical work, starting in 1833. As with all such historical reading, it’s hampered because people back then often meant something meaningfully different by a word than what we do today.
Now consider LLMs as mediocrity machines, ones that succeed if they provide just-OK texts at greatly cheaper prices (ignoring externalities). (1/3)
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What would be neat would be to be able to set a date (like 1833), ask terminological questions, and get the answers a mediocre person would offer as of that date. Surely that would be worth a trillion-dollar valuation. (2/3)
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What does Omarchy need all money *for*? @neauoire https://merveilles.town/@neauoire/117241849685090319
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RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117237322160500501
It occurs to me that Imre Lakatos’s /Proofs and Refutations/ is relevant to the conversation of where the value lies in mathematical work (in the proof? in what the work that leads to the proof throws off?)
The bulk of the book is a stage play (Lakatos was whimsical), in which a teacher and students recapitulate the history of the Euler characteristic for polyhedra (V-E+F=2), focusing on when people say, “but what about this?” Redefinitions, “monster barring,” etc.
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Francis Fukuyama wrote in 1992: “Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because [it] was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.”
I can see my nearly fifty years of participation in software engineering changes in that light.
/End of History/, p. 330
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“One should always beat a dead horse because the horse is never really dead” – Paul Alper
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Once Dawn got a bull as a case. Good genetics. Recently bought for a couple of hundred thousand dollars, maybe?Said bull was penned near another bull, and got the idea of climbing over the barrier to have a fight.
Cattle are not known for their climbing skills. Our bull managed to destroy its testicles. Unfixably. Without being useful for breeding, said bull had become very expensive steaks and burgers.
The syndicate of six purchasers hadn’t insured it. Who’re the big dumb males now?
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As usual for a study from someone in a field labeled “evolutionary X,” the explanation offered is: the reproductive fitness of males. Females participate only vicariously, via their sons’ genes. Passive, ya know. It’s in the female nature. A receptacle.I have an alternative suggestion:
1. The default bull is stupid and aggressive. (Dawn says that in all the species she knows, males are dumber than females, except for humans of course.) (1/3)
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2. Stupidity doesn’t seem to affect reproductive success. But what if Big Dumb Males grow up passive and slower to anger? Big dumb males might stay put and protect the herd from predators, stop scrapping with other bulls over trivia. (2/3)
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3. Girl calves would grow bigger too (why didn’t the article mention how that improves *their* reproductive fitness? Cows do their fair share of goring and kicking predators.) But they’ll still be born smaller than bulls and thus will suffer less from delivery-induced stupidity.
Girls get to play the evolution game too. (3/3)
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The article is about the discovery that maleness is more associated with difficult deliveries. This is certainly widely known among cattle farmers and veterinarians. There’s even an acronym for it in medical records: BDM, which stands for Big Dumb Male syndrome. They have trouble nursing, standing up, perhaps because of oxygen deficits during delivery.
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I hope this is just clumsy writing: ‘A study earlier this year found that “dystocia”—prolonged or challenging labor—is widespread among placental mammals. “I got new respect for mammalian females,” says that study’s author, Nicole Grunstra, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Vienna.’
I personally have hauled on a chain attached to the fetlocks of a cute little baby bull calf that had gotten stuck. They could have just asked me about dystocia.
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1. Syllogisms (due to Aristotle) were taken to capture all valid forms of reasoning.
2. Geometry was the pinnacle of deductive reasoning. (Plato’s Academy famously had a sign, “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.”)
3. Euclid’s geometrical proofs didn’t use syllogisms.
4. People assumed you *could*; geometrical reasoning was a kind of shorthand. (1/3) -
But… “until the late nineteenth century, the history of geometry shows no serious attempts to construe Euclidean geometry syllogistically, or to examine in detail *even one* Euclidean proof to see whether it could be treated syllogistically. […]
"How could generations of logicians claim that the syllogism is the universal canon of valid deduction, when they could not be sure that it suffices for even the first theorem of Euclid?” (2/3)
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Merrill, /Augustus De Morgan and the Logic of Relations/ (1990), p. 11.
Makes you wonder what people in the future will think about our untested beliefs. (3/3)