RE: https://beige.party/@Lana/117559099816448226
This is not "kindness" or "forgiveness." This is a national leader refusing to uphold the law or the constitution, and telling Americans to suck it up and deal. That should sound very familiar.
What if the reason we experience time as a linear process, only going forward at a constant rate, one microsecond-slice at a time, with no direct access to previous or future microseconds, is because this is evolutionarily adaptive?
(note: I scheduled this to send yesterday but don't see it, so maybe a duplicate will show up sometime; it seemed worth throwing out there just in case)
RE: https://mastodon.social/@benroyce/117548924142759149
Even if you are in a place where your vote "doesn't matter," there are good reasons to vote:
Cain killed Abel because ranchers >> farmers. Okay, semi-nomadic herders, but I'ma call them ranchers. And now the people who idolize rancher culture are running the world.
The Israelite religion seems (from what I've read) to have started from a sheperd god cult, maybe mixed in with a thunder god cult. Sheperds and nomadic or semi-nomadic herders in general had higher status in that culture. Sedentary agriculture was an economic and military threat. In the Old Testament the prophets were often rancher-coded and the wicked townsfolk (clue right there) farmer-coded. The sedentary communities, always in low-lying areas like valleys and plains, were wicked. The people were fat, happy, and hedonistic when they settled down to farm. Farmers = wicked, sensuous, lascivious, evil. The prophets were lean, half-starved men from the mountains--the rugged areas where the fat, rich farm folk were too lazy to go, now that they didn't need to graze their goats. The righteous, poor, tough-as-nails prophets pronounced righteous doom on the low-lying sedentary agriculture communities. Sometimes the hill folk were the righteous doom.
The oldest murder according to Judeochristian thought was because one brother was rejected by god. Why? Because he was a farmer and he got uppity, thinking. He could be equal to the ranchers. He tried to make friends with god by offering him, like, grains and vegetables. Fucking vegetables. God, naturally, said "wtf, Cain?"
Meanwhile, god told Abel "you're my boy" when Abel--a rancher/sheep/goat-herder and definitely NOT a farmer--made an offering. Of meat. Dead animal. Wealth. Serious wealth. Cain was faced with the necessity of begging his brother for a sheep or goat or some shit. Instead, he murdered his brother.
Ranchers >> Farmers.
I always think, these days, of what is (more or less) known about Honor Cultures. They are thought to originate from nomadic or semi-nomadic herding cultures. You know, mobile ranchers. They are characterized (at least for men) by obsession with personal reputation, acts of "honor," interpersonal domination, aggressive ingroup/outgroup dynamics. and violence when values or reputation are threatened.
These are the people whose religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) dominate some of the most powerful economic and military societies on the planet.
"Oh, that's an interesting diacritic mark in this student's name"
[dirt on my screen]
"Dammit, I have a spot on my camera lens again"
[food on my screen]
"OMG that celebrity needs to get that melanoma looked at"
[diet coke droplet on my screen]
"Now that is an art installation I'd like to see, though I don't understand how the artist got it placed in the Hague"
[entire gummy bear stuck to my screen]
I don't have pics yet, but I repeated last year's Halloween hijinks: putting some homemade drums (made from plastic barrels) out front with a bucket of candy and a big sign saying "Eat Candy, Make Beats." No regrets whatsoever.
It will be a few years yet, but I'm waiting for the leaks that show Palantir execs made sure to scrub themselves personally out of their surveillance dataset-mergy-stuff.
If you're going to casually drop phrases like "democracy doesn't work" or "voting doesn't work," I'm going to need you to get specific about your preferred alternative because up to this point you sound identical to Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
#ScribesAndMakers Oct. 22: Our next featured creator enjoys making maps. Have you ever made a map?
I did this a lot as a kid: fantasy maps in high school, wishing I had some space to use them. A few years ago I discovered the most fun way I know of to make a map: I spilled some water on cheap graph paper. You know, the kind with a blue-line grid on white background. The water spread and absorbed through the paper, erasing all the blue up to its edges. The edges took fractal shapes very much like coastlines.
I had a photo but can't find it... the problems of having 500,000 photos.
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@guyjantic/117440522127334195
This was one of the most interesting things I've ever personally asked. Thanks for all the responses! I feel less like a freak now, and I see something of the hedonic sneeze spectrum.
Is there a Native American electronic music artist with the stage name Glitchy Gumee? I hope so. There should be.
Except the context was exactly what it sounds like and I am delighted.
Watching The Mummy Returns while I analyze some data tonight. Lessons I have learned from this movie:
I might be in the minority among pointy-headed intellectuals in enjoying The Rock in pretty much everything I've seen him in. The movie is a fun romp, but I can't help but feel we threw a whole lotta Egyptians under the bus.
#movies #TheMummy #BrendanFrasier #TheRock #BMovie #BigBudget
RE: https://mstdn.social/@happinessbot/117447494822100467
This is interesting. Assuming a representative sample (ignoring that this is a big, probably false assumption), are we seeing a cognitive bias where most people think other people are happier than they are? Or are we seeing evidence that people on the fediverse are more miserable than everyone else?
Me, it's the first option: good. 90% or more of my sneezes are enjoyable. I get very nice-feeling goosebumps or some other rush of tingles across my skin and get a small mood lift. The full-body convulsion that comes with a sneeze feels nice, most of the time. No judging but it feels like a tiny, nonsexual orgasm.
Some of my sneezes, however, feel very bad. I'd say about 2% of them are like this. The muscle convulsions are painful and my upper arms (and sometimes my thighs) are in agony for the next 1-5 minutes. It's a significant pain. It feels like I've been hit in my arms and sometimes legs with a baseball bat.
But the vast majority are quite nice. Recent discussions with others suggest that this is not everyone's experience at all.
I have a question for everyone except bots: How do sneezes feel for you on a good-bad spectrum? I mean physically: pleasure? pain? nice? not nice?
How do sneezes feel for you on average? Think of the last 2 years or so.
I just saw the plural of evenin' written down. You know, evening but in a folksy country way, and many of them. It was written evenin's and I am unreasonably angry about this.
I guess I don't need to listen to any more Metallica.
Embarrassing #question about vision and #biology of the human #eye: How does light get to rods & cones past all the stuff in the way?
I'm not really a "bio person" so I only have a basic understanding of how the retina is composed of photoreceptors, bipolar cells, ganglion cells, and amacrine cells. I understand, at least on this level, how rods and cones send action potentials to bipolar (and maybe amacrine) cells, how those send to gangion cells, and where the optic nerve leads next.
But all those bipolar, amacrine, and ganglion cells seem to be stacked between the photoreceptors and the light they respond to. The photoreceptors, as I understand it, are on the anterior (?) surface of the retina, farthest from the lens and pupil. It seems like there should be problems with the light getting past or through those other cells to activate rods and cones.
How does that work?
Some people need to leave some skillz for the rest of us.
