[insert obligatory first comment riffing on big hands correlation that even I find too predictable to write]
Is there any truth to big hands correlation? --he asks in Madeline Kahn voice.
2,3: And 7 is their lucky number.
I guess this improperly mixes the threads, but IMO the New York Times' "Upshot" page beats, pretty handily, both fivethirtyeight.com and the Vox at their purported own game. Advantage old media.
I found this annoying:
While many fewer Americans express animosity toward blacks than they did 40 years ago
Obviously they mean "white Americans" or "non-black Americans". By phrasing it this way, they make white sound like the default. Bzzzzt.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say that by phrasing it this way, they make black people sound like they are not part of the category "American." Bzzzzt.
Meh, "white Americans" appears prominently and repeatedly on that page. Not guilty.
Yeah, that's pretty shitty.
On a related note, how annoyed should I be that Stewart spent 40% of his fundamentally on target bit comparing the Justice response to Wall Street vs. Occupy making hippie-punching jokes?
The "related" note is that one of the jokes was about privilege-checking and mansplaining.
On a barely related note, this evening I learned that one of my neighbors, who's been mostly a nodding acquaintance, is a union painter, a trade that I learned today (from Loomis) is much more liberal than most building trades. I resisted the temptation to comment on this.
I should say, less grumpily, that what little I have seen of Upshot definitely puts it above Vox.
Going back to the TPM/sponsored content controversy, I was surprised to realize the other day that Slate already does sneaky sponsored content.
I don't know why I was surprised; it's not like I thought they had particularly good ethics to begin with. I guess I was surprised at how effective it was.
8: I was prepared to buy this argument, but the phrasing/framing still suggest stat since white (that is, real) Americans still hold a lot of racist views, that's just the way it's going to be.
Slate's useful "US news as written by foreign journalists" feature is helpful here: "A rump minority of American's majority ethnic group clings to racist views that perpetuate social tensions." There's blame here, and it needs to be put on people. Every sentence that elides that fact provides squirming room.
11: Yeah, I've learned to be super-vigilant about the little sponsored content flags. They're small enough that I didn't notice them at first (at least not always)
Feh.
Witt, if you look at the cbs poll they're taking data from, the 46% number does refer to all Americans. So there's one place in the piece where they could have put a "white" but didn't and that comes right after a bunch of headlines and sentences that make it clear that they're talking about the views of whites. I still say not guilty.
14: That's useful to see. I'd still prefer it if they had clarified with "among all Americans" or some such that clarified that the poll answer was coming from all respondents.
I have no idea how I'm meant to consume Vox's actual content. It's some sort of post-blog dystopia of Buzzfeed-style picture-and-teaser-sentence links, scattered randomly along one big page. If there are subpages by topic, or a blog-formatted Yggles section, or anything, I can't find it.
Yeah, when they announced a site that would involve thoughtful analysis putting the news in context I wasn't expecting "29 times Community was the funniest show on TV," complete with embedded YouTube videos.
I'd like a news site to explain how they measure hands in the NFL. I've seen it as from pinky tip to thump tip on a spread hand, and as the distance from the base of the hand to the tip of the middle finger. If they're measure with the latter method, some of those dudes have very large hands.
I have no idea how I'm meant to consume Vox's actual content.
I am still gobsmacked by the fact that they launched without search capacity:
:Can I search the site?
Not yet. This was a miscalculation on our part. We prioritized site search lower on the list of needs in part because so many people know how to use Google (or Bing, or DuckDuckGo, etc). However, it takes time for a new site to be recognized and to build authority within the algorithms that power these search engines. So, for the moment, searching the site externally doesn't work that well. For that reason, we've moved up building a search function on our list of priorities.
I should have taken it as a warning when Klein and others (whom I still follow on Twitter) approvingly linked a "how Buzzfeed was so successful" article. (Or was it Upworthy?)
And I don't really know what to make of Vox's "card stacks" thing. Although a few days ago I was talking to someone who just finished his PhD and is quitting academia to work for a "card startup". No one in the room had any idea what he was talking about. He explained it something like this: "Cards are how information is best displayed on mobile devices. It's the future of the internet and this startup is trying to become the major source of card content. We're designing algorithms to gather information and reformulate it into cards." So, there's that, whatever that is.
Just to play devil's advocate, depending on how they're measuring animosity, racist self-hatred among black people could have decreased in the past forty years as well.
17 -- It'll be pretty easy to live with a linked-here-only policy with Vox.
Re: 18
http://www.cleveland.com/browns/index.ssf/2014/02/nfl_combine_how_do_you_measure.html
Based on that method my hands are about average for a quarterback (bit under 10 inches). I don't have what I 'd think of as particularly big hands, though, perhaps a tad bigger than average but not by a lot. Just a wide-span as I can open my hand out a lot (guitar).
That's the source I found for that method (9.6" for me). But if two guys commenting on a blog have quarterback-sized hands, I start to suspect that there's a different method used at the combine. The Times complicates things by saying average size among all men is 7.4", because that's tiny measured by width, but about what mine is in length.
2: Everybody post their hand and penis sizes. We might have enough men here to do science.
27: Clearly everyone should send nosflow pictures of their hands.
18: With those numbers, it's not pinky to thumb. My hands are a pretty exact 8" pinky to thumb, and I have short fingers.
My measurement is a paltry 9 1/4 inches. No wonder I can't reliably throw a spiral.
26:
To measure your hand like the pros, place your hand palm down on a flat surface and stretch your fingers as far as possible. The measurement is from the outside of your thumb to the outside of your pinky finger.But this is just silly, if it's a measure of hand size. Rather it's a measure of how far you can stretch your hand/fingers -- though obviously the bigger your hand, the larger the measurement assuming similar stretch.
I mean to say that as a (former) piano player, I can stretch my hand such that pinky finger and thumb are at a full 180 degrees. A lot of people can't do that, it seems. You could have huge hands but if you can't stretch the hand/fingers that much, you're going to appear to have smaller hands, by this method of measurement.
It's measuring grip size, or span. Which is fine and relevant for football players and basketball players (and pianists!), but it's not really measuring hand size.
Oops. Blockquote that first paragraph there. It's quoting from the piece linked in 26.
I'm in a room with other people right now so can't do a good hand measurement.
Hm. 8" here as well. I concede: if you're 6'5", you're just going to have bigger hands than the average 5'7" woman even if you can't do a full 180 degrees, which you probably can anyway.
9 1/4 inches, even though I'm 6'3" tall. But my fingers are relatively stubby, and I've never been able to palm a basketball.
I know mine offhand because it's a handy ruler.
Upshot>Vox>538 I've been shocked at how crappy 538 has been. Vox has been mostly mediocre but with some decent stuff. Upshot has been very good with some mediocre stuff, but I'm ok with a certain amount of crap - nifty ideas don't pan out, people have bad ideas, and clickbait is good for the bottom line. Going back one fad cycle, Politico's 'longform' branch seems to combine occasional excellent journalism with a whole bunch of crap. I was just reading a piece on poverty in suburban Atlanta which was very good.
22 Buzzfeed has had some quite good foreign reporting recently, but their site is such a pile of crap that I can't be bothered to wade through it, relying on links from twitter when I'm closely following a story.
If I were a football player my hands would be wide if I had hands.
"Cards are how information is best displayed on mobile devices."
This is how the entire Google Glass interface is set up and it fucking sucks, especially for trying to develop.
Hmm ... cards with hyperlinks, what was old shall be new again.
My mom had a class in that when she was going for her library degree.
I've been avoiding Upshot because I don't want it to count against my limited number of monthly New York Times views, which I generally reserve for reading Krugman. Am I right that Upshot counts against the total?
44: Dude, just google the headline. Free NYT anytime you want.
I just now realized that Upshot is something different from Upworthy.
I'll give that a shot. It seems like I get a different random number of page views every month. Then it decides I've had enough, and starts fucking with me.
The NFL seems to have discovered that guys who are a little taller than average - 5'11" to 6'2" - have somewhat larger than average hands. It's not surprising that anybody in that height range with especially SMALL hands would have some trouble with athletic endeavors involving holding largeish objects securely when other people are trying to knock them away. I'm 6'1", and by the "splay your fingers wide" method I measure 9 13/16" (8.75" from palm-heel to middle fingertip). Well within the range of pro football success! Notably, while a bunch of folks have remarked on the size of my hands, they've all been women and shortish men; nobody my own larger-than-average height (which is still "undersized" for a modern NFL QB) has ever said "wow, you've got big hands." And nobody seems to have found data that gets you from "having larger hands helps you hold onto the football" to "this is basically the smallest your hand can be to be an effective NFL QB".
If any NFL teams really pushed Teddy Bridgwater down their rankings because at 6'2" he "only" had 9.25" hands, I think they're radically overinterpreting a very limited data set they don't really understand yet.
There's no way in hell 80% of white people would actually be willing to live in a 50% black neighborhood. I don't believe it for a second.
On the first of the items of Information in the OP:
It seems that the charts (the data) come not from the CBS poll, which simply affirms that "While many fewer Americans express animosity toward blacks than they did 40 years ago, a CBS News poll from March showed that 46 percent of Americans thought racial discrimination would always exist", but from:
Sources: General Social Survey; Social Trends in American Life: Findings from the General Social Survey since 1972
I don't see a link to that. Mayhap could google it, though I'm off for something else at the moment. Either I'm missing the link(s), or they're not provided.
The GSS is Big Sociology. Been around forever.
3: They definitely wear big gloves.
And their emails have lots of typos.
49: It's believable if you grant that for many white people a "half black" neighborhood translates to "two black families down the street from us."
I'm joking, but the truth behind it is spelled out in Massey & Denton's American Apartheid. IIRC there are a number of stats showing that that the "tipping point" for whites feeling comfortable is different than that of blacks -- and that this difference makes it very hard for neighborhoods to maintain a meaningfully racially integrated equilibrium.
Also, according to the book, as of 1978, just 28% of white Americans said they would live in a half-black neighborhood.
One thing nice about having pretty big hands (laydeez) and waiting tables was the ability to carry three pint glasses in a single hand (two in your fingers/palm and a third resting on your wrist, pressing against the other two).
Huh, I had never checked out the Upshot until now, and wasn't even sure what it was exactly (though I had seen it linked from the NYT front page). It's pretty good.
54: In Bavaria, where beer comes with handles, they carry four 1/2 liters in each hand.
My hands are fairly small but my feet are 13s, and I have an unusually large head.
I remember how the physical description of John Glenn in The Right Stuff could have been me, except smaller, as he was a fighter pilot. Big head, small hands, heavy legs.
49: It's believable if you know what whites consider it allowable to confess to, and what they don't.
Those charts in the Upshot post are interesting for what they show about what white people allow themselves to say.
53: I read an article a few months ago in Slate about how the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa had resegregated. One of the details I found especially interesting is that once a minority becomes about 30% of the population, the dominant culture begins to change in a way that makes the previously dominant group uncomfortable (eg soccer vs rugby on the dorm TVs). I think your joke is spot on.
The two tables from Massey and Denton:
Black Americans'neighborhood preferences in 1976.
White Americans' preferences.
More (this is p. 93):
"Once a neighborhood reached about one-third black, the limits of racial tolerance were reached for the majority of whites: 73% would be unwilling to enter, 57% would feel uncomfortable, and 41% would try to leave.
At the 50-50 threshold, a neighborhood became unacceptable to all but a small minority of whites: 84% said they would not wish to enter a neighborhood that was 57% black, 64% would try to leave, and 72% would feel uncomfortable.
Whereas 63% of blacks picked a 50-50 racial mixture as the most desirable, the great majority of whites would not be willing to enter such a neighborhood and most would try to leave.
Although blacks and whites may share a common commitment to "integration" in principle, this word connotes very different things to people in the two racial groups. For blacks, integration means racial mixing in the range of 15- to 70% black, with 50% being the most desirable; for whites, it signifies much smaller black percentages."
(Emphasis added)
My neighborhood is about 35-40% black (more like 80% 40 years ago) but I leveraged the racism to get a pretty nice house.
Also, is it time to Clippers bandwagon? Maybe. I'm telling myself that I still loathe their transplant/masochists fans, but this is a hell of a fun team to watch and an incredible story.
Also, is it time to Clippers bandwagon?
They seem much less annoying this year than they have the last two years (particularly Paul and Griffin).
But I still say the Thunder are an amazingly likable team. Did you see the Kevin Durant MVP speech? It's amazing, he's a really unusual personality.
Yes, Durant is amazing and likeable, as is the OKC team generally. I wouldn't cry at all if OKC wins. Still, have you seen those goobers in the stands?
Having lived in Seattle, I hope everyone involved in the Thunder is killed by lightning strikes.
Or alternatively, sucked into a jet engine.
Tornadoes are also an option in Oklahoma.
There's no way in hell 80% of white people would actually be willing to live in a 50% black neighborhood. I don't believe it for a second.
Yeah, as others have said, this is more measuring American's knowledge of what it's acceptable to say in public than what they actually think. Even so, I'm surprised almost 1/3 of Americans think outright housing discrimination is ok, especially because unlike the rest of the questions it's very clearly against the law.
I'm surprised almost 1/3 of Americans think outright housing discrimination is ok, especially because unlike the rest of the questions it's very clearly against the law.
Well, they probably don't know that.
Also interesting: apparently more white Americans are willing to support housing discrimination and segregation in 2012 than in the previous time this question was asked. Hard to know if this is a new trend or a blip. Secondly, people responding affirmatively to blacks not having motivation and willpower to pull themselves out of poverty held steady for a few years, increased and is now declining. I wonder the break was 2008? Now that many more people are struggling, they're more understanding to the issues those in poverty face. Of course, 45% of Americans still think this, so WTF. Also 40% think whites are more hardworking, and if you look at the recent data points trends do not show number as declining.
The Times complicates things by saying average size among all men is 7.4", because that's tiny measured by width, but about what mine is in length.
I call bullshit on this. I have fucking tiny hands - as in, I've literally never met an adult with smaller hands - and I'm 7.5" or so by width.
So, grabbing a ruler, 9.75" span, and 7.75" from base of palm to tip of finger. So I can believe 7.4" as an average hand length, not span. My impression has always been that my hands are maybe slightly bigger than average (as per above) but not by a lot.
Hmm, the link in 26 is associated with the Cleveland Browns. In recent years the Browns have been notorious for using high draft picks on QBs who were a splash in college but questionable professional-level skills and athleticism, and who have turned out to be busts (Tim Couch, Colt McCoy, Brady Quinn) and this year drafted Johnny Manziel, a QB similar to those but who is being touted as having big hands. I sense a league-wide conspiracy/joke. "Darn it! Cleveland got the big hands QB again!" (either because there is nothing to it or they all measure it differently ...)
44-45- Also incognito or whatever it's called on your browser of choice.
There are in fact a number of places that describe the measurement and reference outside of thumb to pinkie. I'm wondering of it is between the outside of the base of the digits instead of the tip.
I can't imagine that base of fingers could be right. Then their hands would be truly giant. I wonder if it's just that the slope on the bell curve falls off pretty fast? So that, say, 7.5-9.5 is fairly common but over 10 quite rare?
Basketball or heavyweight boxing might be a good source of data.
Although boxers measure fist circumference (quick measurement of my own has it as about average compared to historic boxers of my approximate height).
If I may tie the thread together, NYT columnist David Brooks has some of the ugliest hands I've ever seen on the PBS NewsHour: stubby fingers sticking out of bizarrely puffy, pillowy palms. He wouldn't make a good quarterback.
Also, for years the NYT sports section made a point of mentioning Patrick Ewing's small hands as a critical weakness in his game.
Big hands I know you're the one
78.1: But how much fun would it be to watch him face an NFL blitz?
I can just barely palm a basketball. Will measure when I get home. Some of the NBA guys appear to be holding the basketball about like my wife would hold a softball.
80: I don't wish any physical harm upon David Brooks. He isn't Jonah Goldberg.
77.1: OK. And per the picture two-thirds of the way down the page here, it does look like open hand pretty much tip-to-tip.
The Panthers first round draft pick, Kelvin Benjamin, is a 6'5", 240lb receiver with 10.25# hands and an 83-inch wingspan who will be catching passes from an almost identically sized QB. It's almost like they've found a race of space aliens.
Off Topic, but can any lawyerish types around here explain why this is any less batshit insane than it sounds?
I blame Halford.
OK, I measured the boyfriend's hand. He's 5'11"ish, and his hand measures 9.5". He says he can't properly palm a basketball. I don't think he has dispropotionately large hands. My hands are 6.5" which is one octave on a piano. I can't easily handle a softball, but I can throw a spiral.
See, I'm thinking of basketball players. At some NBA venues, they have the players' handprints, and placing my hand in those is like placing a child's hand in my handprint. I have no trouble believing that Michael Jordan or Shaq have hands that are over 10" from palm to fingertip. Surely some football players have similarly large hands. If top flight wide receivers are also being measured at around 10", then I'm going to believe that it's a palm to fingertip measurement. If they're around 11-13", then it's probably a spread measurement.
Wasn't Art Tatum said to have huge hands (could reach a tirteenth?)? I wonder what that is in inches.
77.3: Is there any reason to think hand size makes a difference in punching power? The weight difference has to be negligible. It might make a difference in injury resistance.
I can just barely palm a basketball at 9 1/4". Your boyfriend may have size, ydnew, but his technique is clearly lacking.
Aha, the NBA collects both length and width.
89: Properly, Eggplant. I might suggest that he's both modest and a perfectionist.
Here. There's no way my hands are the exact same size as a 6'5" wideout taken in the first round of the NFL draft. They must be measuring palm to fingertip.
92: The No 1 draft pick for 2010 at the link in 90, John Wall, has hands 9.5" wide and is 6'4" in shoes. So, it's not at all clear that they must be measuring height, not width.
Jordan's are 9.75" high and 11.375" wide and Shaq's are 9" high and 11" wide according to this.
I'm skeptical of the pinky-to-thumb measure, because I feel like different people's hands open at different angles. My hands are pretty small, and my pinky-to-thumb measure is 9", but I feel like that's mostly because I can keep my hand flat while opening them to a pretty big angle--a lot larger than the angle in the picture in 83, at least. I'd guess about 150 degrees. My wrist-to-tip-of-middle-finger distance is 7.5".
Can I measure pinky of one hand to thumb of the other?
How wide are Michael Sam's hands? (I know he's not a QB, but people who don't follow handegg are only interested in him.)
it's not at all clear that they must be measuring height
But Wall's hand length is 8.25, which is pretty damn long, so he has unusually narrow hands, but they're not small. For comparison, my width is 9.6, but length is 7.75.
96: 9.25.
That's the size, but we don't know if it's width or length. Apo, you've known some football players, no? How enormous are their hands?
In fact, I can test 94 on myself. I measured my left hand to get that 9" number. The same measurement on my right hand gives 8.25". There's no difference in the size of my hands, just in their ability to open at wide angles. Probably something to do with playing the violin when I was younger: reaching the pinky out as far as possible with the position of other fingers fixed was something I had to do with my left hand, but never my right.
Obligatory link to Kawhi Leonard's hand.
Jordan had famously huge hands, though, even for a guy who was 6'6". Phil Jackson once said that an important difference between Jordan and Bryant was that since Bryant's hands were a lot smaller than Jordan's he had to take more deliberate care of the basketball, whereas Jordan could fake aggressively with the ball in one hand and not worry about losing control. Shaq is 7'1"; the average NBA player is 6'7" - in terms of height and frame they're another notch or two up the ladder from average NFL guys.
If Tatum could reach a 13th, that's more or less a foot, though I'm always curious when that's presented without a lot of context; for a given wide interval, it's one thing to be able to reach it, another thing to be able to play passages with it, and still another thing to fill in notes in between, because if you're stretching your hand as wide as you can than your three middle fingers aren't in a position to be very useful. I can reach an 11th but not fluently. I can play 10ths OK, but Tatum (and Fats Waller, and some other early jazz pianists) could casually play fast passages of 4-note chords spaced out over a 10th, which is beyond me, and most other people.
The only thing that makes me second guess the idea that the measurements are thumb-pinky spread - which is what all the articles say it is, and puts the measurements in line with what you'd expect anyway from men in the "taller than average but not towering" range - is the kind of overhyped astonishment people are expressing over Russell Wilson's hands in the same articles. It seems not unlike the slightly skewed logic wherein at 6'3" someone has "prototypical QB size!" and at 6'1" someone is "undersized for the position": ceteris paribus, it's just not a huge difference.
94/100: But being able to stretch to a wider angle means (say for a wide receiver) it's easier to catch a ball because the area is bigger. Or easier to manipulate a football or basketball. I don't think it's supposed to uniformly measure the distance from thumb tip to palm, width of palm, and pinky tip to palm. I don't know whether the angle is something one could vary with exercise as an adult. (Mine don't differ, maybe you're just a freak?)
Maybe I am a freak. Does no one else have a big difference in how widely their two hands can be opened? (I'm assuming the palm has to be kept flat while the measurement is made; if I lift up the palm a bit, I can open my right hand almost as widely.)
My hands open up about the same stretched to the max (in the air or on a table) but my left hand gets there a lot more easily - my right hand feels like it's under more tension at the same stretch. I assume that's from playing 10ths a lot on piano, and maybe also playing guitar. I'm right handed, and my right hand definitely has the stronger grip.
Since this is the athletics thread, I'll mention hockey great Volodya Putin. He played in the Russian amateur championship game the other night, leading his team to a 20-5 victory with six goals and five assists.
Not bad for a guy who's nearly as old as me.
I just don't believe I have bigger than average hands for a man, and I know I don't have unusual flexibility on any other joint. I've always thought of myself as having smallish hands for my size (well, big palms, but short fingers.) So if the average man is measuring 7.4", and my thumb to pinky spread is 8", I do not believe we're measuring the same thing.
I think that's right. I'm just about convinced that the NFL means "hand length" when they say "hand size."
But what physical measurement would be better for estimating ball control than thumb to pinky? Certainly not base of palm to fingertips.
The OP article does say hand "length". My hands are biggish but I can't quite palm a basketball and measure 8.25 length and just under 10" span, so I dunno.
You'd think they'd measure finger to palm length, too.
My hands are biggish but I can't quite palm a basketball
You must have pudgy hands, white man.
115: stubby fingers compared to palm size. In general my body type is "tall dude built like a short dude".
Turns out that having relatively enormous palms and a relatively enormous torso isn't actually the ideal body type for many sports besides, I dunno, Red Rover.
Yeah always thought I should have given rugby a try. Instead I played ultimate like it was rugby.
I can stretch to 9.5 span, either hand. Laying my hand on the tape with my longest finger at its edge, the tape reads 8.25 as it comes out from under the flattened heel of my hand. Haven't actually tried palming a basketball in 40 years, and may always have overinflated my basketball to try to compensate for its age. It was nine years old when it burst.
I can open my left hand more, and it's longer from wrist to tip, which is definitely guitar related. The difference isn't huge: maybe 0.5" in span, and 0.25" in length.
Oh, wow, David Brooks *does* have ugly hands.
104, 106, 122: Yeah, my left hand easily does 180 degrees, but the right is more like 175, and makes it to 180 only with some effort. That surprises me a little bit: I know the spread comes from piano playing, and I'm right-handed; I'd have thought the right would have an equal stretch.
On the other hand! I have what's known as hitchhiker's thumb on the right hand, which means the extension on the right hand is a bit shortened, since the darned thumb doesn't stretch *straight* out, but curves back unless I specifically keep it from doing so.
This used to bother me to no end. On the other other hand, an old friend was so proud of his hitchhiker's thumbs that he'd occasionally thrust them in your face so you could see how astonishing they were, and demand that you show yours. Ha ha, I could say! Witness this thumb! Good times.
||
So who's ready for some Eurovision? Woo!
|>
Winner get access to the Black Sea.
123: You need a profile shot of the horizontal hand to appreciate the throw-pillowy volume of his palms.
So who's ready for some Eurovision? Woo!
me!
85:Which is the insane part? That the patent issued, or that Amazon wanted the patent in the first place?
117: ha! That is my body type, but with mini legs.
My hands also have different spans, I think due to playing the flute.
I don't think of flautists as having a reputation for promiscuity. Bass players, on the other hand...
The only bona fide nymphomaniac I ever knee was a double bass player.
You can tell which ones are the poser nymphomaniac bass players, because they don't know how to drop D.
knew, not knee. Was assigned as the roommate to the double bass player on a multi week tour when I was at a very tender age. A french horn player took pity and kicked out his roommate so I could get away from the 3-4 "guests" a night scene. Bassist was a very nice person otherwise, but unhealthily needy in this one aspect.
respect, not aspect. Phone keyboard.
Your phone also auto-corrects "extremely lucky" in a strange way.
OT: Inspired by 139, whyever is there no Buzzfed quiz for "Which Con Air character are you?" Who wouldn't relish a day or two of Fb updates like "Swamp Thing? Fuck you, Buzzfeed! I'm Sally Can't Dance or nobody!"
||
I had no idea this wonderful thing was a thing that happened.
|>
Oh, lots of wonderful things happen without anybody telling me.
142: I read an awful lot of that, but gave before I figured out who was arguing with whom about what.
142: what's going on there, tweets? I mean, who are those people? And why should I care? Help me see the light!
I only got as far as the fact that it's remarkable more people don't try to kill me. I thought that was too obvious a point to be worth reading.
I believe if you look up "pointless morass" in the dictionary you get that link.
Yes, who are those people? The page sucks to read on my phone. Is one bob?
I think the one guy is the jeopardy dude, the nerd hero. But that's all I know. It's a bit confusing without having a clear sense of the players.
In other news, a former unfogged commenter has inspired me to buy a turntable. What should I get? Surely someone here has a non-crazy recommendation. (Yes, I know I'm an idiot for thinking that. But a guy can dream, right?
150: Get the kind that plays both LPs and EPs.
True story: The beer coaster tells me that drinking on an empty stomach increases my chance of getting wasted and getting in a fight. And this is the classier of my usual places.
Should I order wings just to be safe or chance it? Nobody here looks much bigger than me.
144 et seq.: the guy writing is Arhur Chu, who was dramatically successful on Jeopardy by applying elementary game theory, and was villified for it. The people he is tearing a glorious new one are he singularity-happy nitwits at Less Wrong and their fellow internet "rationalists". The proximal reason he is tearing them a new one is that they think he should be nicer to the various scientific racists and men's rights advocates they admit into their big tent of coolly analytic evaluation of any fool fucking idea some asshole can sciencishly. I dunno who "Scott" or the other people he particularly calls out are, but I know the type.
"Arthur Chu", not "Arhur", which is not a name.
Order wings to stay grounded or don't and wing it? Decisions decisions.
And hopefully my link took you to Arthur Chu's comment rather than the OP, since that's all I read and/or intended to link to.
155 is missing letters and, more crucially, words. Fill them in as necessary.
158: I may have missed that. Stupid phone.
I refuse to believe Mencius Moldbug is anything but a literary creation.
Here, in this page of twits dismissing other, worse twits, you can read about Mencius Moldbug.
Yeah, 142 is the comment and it's grand.
Will any of them buy me wings?
Ring a bell and see if an angel will give you some.
Oh my fucking god these people are nimrods.
167: why are you reading that just nuke it from orbit already!
Ah. I habitually start reading anything from the top of the page, and I don't think I got back to Chu's comment, which is very good.
173: Right. Once I stopped wondering why I couldn't get to the top of the page and let the browser do what it wanted to do, it was great.
I didn't know anything about this Chu guy except that people were pissed off at him about his clever Jeopardy strategy. But after reading the comment linked in 142 I'm a fan.
I don't think most of the people in my professional community who buy into the superintelligent robot thing would subscribe to the more racist and sexist aspects of the "rationalist" community---although the aforementioned libertarian guy across the hall skirts kind of close to racism at times with his rants about affirmative action---but I'm still disturbed by how what I used to think was a marginal group of internet weirdos seems to exert increasing amounts of influence on my professional and social circles.
Also there seems to be some overlap between these folks and the people I know who are really into Quora. By clicking through to read some Quora answers linked through FB I somehow ended up on a daily mailing list of "interesting" Quora questions, and I'm shocked by how many of them are of the form "why do feminists hate men so much?" and the like. It seems like there's a lot of concentrated Silicon Valley douchiness there. One person I know is probably quitting academia to take a job working for them.
Before we go criticizing men's rights advocates, I think we should remember that it was a man who killed Hitler.
And that man's name... was Hitler. So think before you start judging people.
177: Quora's forced-login thing has made it delightfully easy for me to stay ignorant of what it is. Trans-eHow-manism?
I liked transhumanism better when it mostly consisted of Habs Moravec saying goofy things and people sort of mildly making fun of him. Now it's some kind of festering utopian fanfic nerdbro eugenics league? Goddamit, internet.
Quora's forced-login thing is how I'm getting these daily emails, I think. I feel like the StackExchange family of sites does a better job of what it's trying to do, but Quora seems way more popular among people I know. And there's some weird cult of personality there. People who answer lots of questions become objects of questions themselves, like "What's it like to be [person who answers every other question on Quora]?" or "What did [that person] eat for dinner last night?" and then people answer questions about themselves and get upvoted by their adoring fans.
181 should be Hans Moravec. Habs Moravec, the briefly considered but quickly discarded roboticist mascot for the Canadiens, didn't come into it.
I'm still disturbed by how what I used to think was a marginal group of internet weirdos seems to exert increasing amounts of influence on my professional and social circles.
Obviously the solution is to try to combat their influence by promoting the ideas of a different marginal group of internet weirdos. But where would you find such a thing?
What's quora good for? I mean, when would I expect a better answer on quora vs. stackexchange or metafilter?
I don't know anyone who uses it regularly, except for people who work there. I've occasionally browsed it, and I've noticed there are a lot of questions of the form you mention, what's it like to be [some Quora celebrity]? Other than that, and questions like "how much money do bankers/employees at hot startup/etc. make?", Quora doesn't seem to have much of a focus.
The problem with any site based on users rating each other is that it will become dominated by people who really enjoy that sort of thing.
I wonder what would happen to, say, Reddit if you weighted everyone's votes inversely to their voting frequency.
Oh, also, SV gossip like "is working for [bay area company] as good/bad as it sounds?" or "why don't people like working with [some person I've never heard of]?"
It's possible that the questions I see are a function of the people I know who use quora, and quora employees are into SV gossip and how much money people make.
I mean, it would probably still suck, but it would suck differently.
Despite everything, I am continuing to pretend that you are all talking about your dicks.
But I'm only halfway through the thread. Presumably later on someone reports something tragic so I look like a monster.
One of the top questions on Quora right now is "What are the disadvantages of being smart?" and all the answers are about how hard their lives are because they're so smart. I feel like that just about sums up the whole site.
191.1: The part about the relative size of the left one versus the right one must throw a wrench in that.
193: As do the genders of many of the commenters, but I was skimming.
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My kid's at the prom. Or more accurately, my kid's at whatever it is they're doing after the prom.
Feels kinda weird.
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150: collective advice on turntables for neb relatively recently, don't know how to search for it but I'm sure someone does.
Looking at the New Yorker just now, there's a cartoon on page 112 featuring the hand measurement we've spent the thread talking about. Taking the measurements in the panel as his own, he's got small hands for his height.
Also - Ashley Bouder Project tix have gone on sale. Buy early, buy often etc.
Yay Arthur. He was an acquaintance of mine in the past, and I'm pleasantly surprised to see that he's gained some fame kicking ass. I'm not surprised, but I'm also happy that he's such a deeply decent human being. There have been a few commenters on blogs I read, "polite drawing room" types of blogs, as Arthur Chu would put it, who are supporters of neo-scientific racism. It really gets under my skin how we're supposed to value civility and 'openmindedness' more than taking a stand against racial hatred. Somehow reviving the theories and discourses behind 19th-20th century colonialism, slavery, and genocide (with a slight update to the jargon) is less offensive than calling someone a racist.
I searched Quora for advice on commuting in the Bay Area and it wasn't much better than advice on city-data.com, which actually can have useful advice on that sort of thing in the forum sections. A lot of Quora seems to be useless.
actually p. 80, on the May 12th issue, probably where I got the "12" from.
110: I'm just about convinced that the NFL means "hand length" when they say "hand size."
Nah, something's going on but I don't think that is what it is. Finally got a chance to measure mine and I am 10 inches when fully stretched. Looking at the NBA data in 98 that does not add up. I am 6'2" and looking through the draft years, there is generally maybe one of the draftees each year who is 10" and my height or shorter, and many taller players with hand span smaller than 10". My measurement protocol is almost certainly not their measurement protocol. And I looked at the ratio of span to length--my length was almost exactly 8" so I have a 1.25 ratio--which is bigger than basically anyone else on there.
Here is my hypothesis: I notice that if I extend my hand to an initial "natural" stopping point it is 9.25, I can then "hyper-extend" my hand to the 10 inches. I'm guessing that the intent of the test is to capture the first value.
Could you actually make that work? Since it is someone else doing the measuring, maybe. But of course the players have something to gain by having a bigger number. But if you are doing a lot of them you probably can get pretty good sense of what the "real" number should be.
Although after all of that I found an actual 2010 protocol online here. (Developed for Aussies Rule Football, however--which is what is referenced in the link in 83. So who knows).
1d. HANDSPAN
Equipment
• Purpose built measuring frame, or
• Metal ruler 30 cm in length with 0.1 cm increments
Test Procedure
1) Position the marking frame and ruler on a table. Fix to the table using clear tape.
2) The right hand is placed on a flat table featuring 90 degree frame with cm scale on
the horizontal plane. The right thumb must touch the vertical frame with the hand
fully outstretched and lying flat on the table.
3) Measurement on the scale extends from vertical frame where the thumb is touching
to the outside tip of little finger of the right hand.
4) Report the maximal handspan to the nearest 0.1 cm.
The only other "shortening" effect I could imagine would be geometry if the orientation of the hand is constrained in some way relative to the measuring scale but do not see that from the description.
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It's too bad there weren't more compelling story lines for NBC's Premiership final day soccerpalooza. A complicated relegation scenario that had people checking into multiple games, for instance.
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205. True. The nailbiters were Everton vs Man City and Sunderland vs Man Utd last week. After that it was mostly a formality at both ends of the table.
Huh. Thanks for 142 (I think). I had no idea of the existence of these people, though I think I've vaguely heard of Less Wrong before.
This seems to cover them helpfully, with reference to the "Scott" that Arthur is responding to.
|| Just got a call from a client with a new case. The key question is what is maroon? Reference materials welcome. |>
Neb and LB and essear and I think trapnel are maroons.
209: You don't count yourself? Is being a maroon an undergrad-only thing?
Why don't they just measure how far you're fingers wrap around a football/rugby ball?
I first read 209 as, Neb and LB and essear and I think trapnel are is a maroons.
213: Because they still believe in the promise of a classic liberal education.
Oh, the question really is is that maroon?
215: "Because this is more sciencey."
211: I do! I think one is extra maroon (or Hawkeye or whatever) if it is undergrad, though. I am a mudblood!
An acquaintance of mine who was once a reliably reasonable conservative (and fun to argue with) has since descended into scientific racism and climate change denialism and is now handsomely remunerated by AEI to spread FUD about climate change. It's very disappointing. I have no idea how to engage with him at all, which I'd like to do because we share a common interest where he'd be very helpful to me in building connections to the wider community. I think all I can do is disengage.
