lucius septimius 4/24/2021 6:54:35 AM

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Occasional Reader 4/24/2021 7:04:45 AM

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Reply to lucius septimius in 1:

“Switzerland is like the jazz of countries; it just keeps going and going and nobody can figure out why.”

-Sterling Archer

Occasional Reader 4/24/2021 7:07:12 AM

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Here’s the most surreal thing you’ll see all day.

Commentary on the Columbus, OH police-involved shooting, by an... um, expert... in, er, knife-violence:

https://twitter.com/TheRealOJ32/status/1385268007203602433?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1385290361770332163%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es3_&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Facecomments.mu.nu%2F%3Fpost%3D393534

/and the most bizarre part is, compared to most of the commentary out there on Twitter, he (relatively speaking) makes sense

Kosh's Shadow 4/24/2021 11:40:13 AM

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So google is trying out a new technology to track people for ads, now that their tracking cookies are being blocked

You can see if the have included you in the trials and more about it here

lucius septimius 4/24/2021 11:56:17 AM

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Interesting moment in the virtual conference.  

There is a young woman who I think just wandered in.  First time she asked a question she began by going into the whole "I ask this from the perspective of a woman of color blah blah blah."  The question had nothing to do with the subject and the speaker was courteous but deflected.

Today she stuck up her virtual hand and asked a ... question?  It began with a passage from some piece of woke media, then went to Nancy Pelois's statement about being so happy that Georg Floyd died for the the Democrats (not exactly how she phrased it, but that was Blinky's point) and then into some very general social justice thing about hos "POC are constantly being destroyed by a horrible system blah blah blah" during which little homily she obviously started crying.

Again, the question really had nothing to do with the paper (which in a very round about way tied the comical lower class characters in Shakespeare -- think the Rude Mechanicals or Falstaff's followers -- back to an institution in late 15th early 16th theater, the guy who would get up on stage periodically and solicit money from the audience.  I don't know if I buy the whole thing but she made a good case and had obviously done a great deal of research on the question of how theater was financed in the Renaissance.  George Flloyd was nowhere to be found).

The funny thing about it, was that the woman stumbled on two fundamental truths without realizing it:

1) George Floyd was no martyr, in large part because he had not gone out there to put himself in jeopardy for some cause -- he was just a drugged up criminal who was killed by police.

2) Thieves and scoundrels in comedies are funny; George Floyd is not funny and you probably wouldn't want to be around him, which makes celebrating him sort of perverse.

Of course having made those points, she immediately lapsed back into a recitation of woke tropes and talking points.  But it was sort of remarkable to see in the midst of all that at least a glimmer of recognition that all this BLM bullshit is just that -- bullshit.

The funniest part was that the speaker, though she had an interesting idea, talked entirely in academic jargon so thick that it took her 1000 words to say something that could have been stated in one sentence.  Watching woke and post-modern trying to engage one another was actually sort of entertaining.

Kosh's Shadow 4/24/2021 12:37:26 PM

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Reply to lucius septimius in 5:

Reminds me of an article I read in Annals of the History of Computing, about early-day Arpanet and Internet maps.

Several pages could be summarized "The maps showed what the people who drew the maps wanted to represent", albeit with some more detail, but they could have discussed why those particular maps were important at the time.

Another article was a review of some book by a person with a Communication degree. It was the most incomprehensible jargon I have seen. You'd think such a person would know how to communicate. But I guess it is like with Education majors; they don't know how to actually educate.

Besides, it seems in academia, paper length is important, more than being understood.

Occasional Reader 4/24/2021 12:48:41 PM

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In #5 lucius septimius said: the guy who would get up on stage periodically and solicit money from the audience.

Reminds me of the guy from “PDQ Bach” whose job it was to get hissed by the audience.

Occasional Reader 4/24/2021 12:49:15 PM

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OK, I thought this was funny, even with the misspelling: 

Kosh's Shadow 4/24/2021 3:08:52 PM

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Reply to Occasional Reader in 8:

Well, in math, a lemma is sort of a small theorem proved while proving a larger theorem.

Thus, a dilemma must be two of them, just like dilithium is two lithiums, isn't it, Scotty?

Occasional Reader 4/24/2021 4:36:05 PM

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Reply to Kosh's Shadow in 9:

Well, I was referring more to the missing "c" in Schrödinger.  INever midn the umlaut.)

"Dilemma" is a perfectly cromulent spelling of that word.