Film, well it's not exactly pure escapism since I find one of the most important aspects of film for me is when it plays to a sense of deep empathy, puts you in the shoes of other people, gives a sense of other lives.
To that end I need to get ready to catch The Master on 35mm and I'm thinking seriously of going to see Visconti's 4 hour Ludwig tonight.
Won't help with jollity, but I've wondered if this would work for you.
Related because escapist: the Machiavelli-themed political board game is making progress. An artist is now on board and is painting lots of tiny little pictures of Renaissance Italians scheming and rioting and so on. Look for it in stores by Christmas. You won't find it but the walk will do you good.
Also I can really recommend the "try to do one fun new thing per day" thing which AIMHMHB I tried in late 2016 after all the shit that happened that year.
Once you go Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, you'll never go .....
Fucking Germans. How do they rhyme anything.
Python is awesome. Although the recommendation in 1 is better.
I find horror* movies/books oddly comforting for some reason.
*Supernatural, not serial killers or torture porn.
Maybe escapist because alternate history? - the novel I was mentioning round here a year or so ago, in which Keats doesn't die, has finally found a small press willing to take it on. It comes out early next year, but is taking preorders right now and I can slip early copies to preorderers sub rosa.
9: Congratulations. I'd love a novel about a 225-year-old poet.
Anyway, my escapism is likely to be work. I've committed to starting a new job and finishing an old one at the same time. I'll not have much flexibility between now and October.
Once you go Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, you'll never...
...be happy with any otha.
Obviously.
And congratulations to lourdes! I remember you mentioning it before.
I was going to say, head down two blocks to the telephone booth, await your next instructions, but since there aren't telephone booths anymore it's at \wa\rm\sou\th dot com.
15: ...you'll never lose 'er, obviously.
My escapism is determining the feasibility and benefits of various investor citizenship programs.
It really is. But I'm going to wait for LB to review it before I commit ("This book has all the strengths of its genre and is also independently not bad".)
2 Well bloody hell, I didn't sleep well last night, stupidly forgot to check the train schedules the night before, and missed my train for the 2 pm screening of The Master.
The best movie about someone from Tilden.
8.last I forgot from the last thread but did you see Hereditary? What did you think?
Congrats lourdes!
20 I heartily agree, that cover's right up my alley.
Thanks, all, I also feel like that cover came out just right. (Props to JMW Turner for the watercolor). LB's reviewing career of course occurred to me, but it takes a brave woman or man to face her candor.
My big escapism is still World of Warcraft. Almost an infinite time-suck, and there's at least part of it that's likely to appeal to almost everyone who likes the basic idea of computer games.
As for fiction, the obscure German names in 7 reminded me of the 1632 series. We've talked about it here at least once. It's huge if you count all the short fiction and novels by authors other than the original one. I'm actually cooling down on it, the last few novels didn't do much for me and short stories are always hit or miss, but I'd still call it fun overall.
I did ask text if he really wanted me to review his book: that review was specifically requested after I told him privately I had not been impressed.
But on yours, the cover is beautiful, and I've preordered a copy.
29: Ah, I get it. Requesting that review certainly did work as a short-term publicity strategy.
Python is my job.* Still, it's pretty nice.
Basically all I do is play guitar, and occasionally read a book on the tube. Playing a musical instrument is pretty nice as a way of switching your brain off, or at least, the 'stress making' bits of your brain.
Oh, and try to go to the pub regularly.
* when I'm coding, and not "owning products".
Python's my job too nowadays, and I agree, it's both reasonable for a job and a good introduction to the rewarding experience of creating bugs and then spending an hour pulling out your hair in front of the monitor trying to figure out what you typed wrong.
If it's like SAS, usually there's a semicolon in the wrong place or omitted.
Maybe if you created them in a glovebox they wouldn't get in your hair?
Masturbate masturbate cry masturbate.
My kid is learning Python and keeps asking what he should write and I have no idea. He's made a few logic games and tried to make a chatbot.
Heebie, you're a mathematician. Do you have any interest in mathematical logic? B/c if so, maybe you might find languages like ML and Haskell interesting? They're intrinsically based on well-founded induction and have type systems based (eventually) on Russell's theory of types. The language and ideology of induction is baked deeply into those languages, and into their metatheory. A lovely example of that, is the paper _The Constructive Engine_ by G. Huet, where he explains (with code) how one can look at terms of the lambda-calculus as members of an equivalence class, and how computations over lambda-terms are most properly viewed as computation of members of that equivalence class. It was .... a shockingly lovely exposition, and really convinced me of the value of thinking in terms of well-founded induction.
Board games with friends are my social go to. I love reading and good books have been coming out too fast to keep up with. (I recently enjoyed the Binti trilogy and My Real Children by Jo Walton for very different reasons.)
While my wife was practicing for a play, I dug into and loved the new HBS Battletech. I sunk over 100 hours into the main campaign, and appreciated it for the gameplay (very faithful to the old minis game) and a surprisingly good storyline.
Oh he was also convinced he'd found a new way to derive pi using a right triangle inscribed in a circle and I had to dash his dreams by telling him that 1/pi (~0.318) and 1-2^-.5 (~0.293) were not "close enough" to be considered equal.
Anyway my current escapism is traveling to various foreign cities and imagining buying cheap real estate. Unfortunately that's not the kind of escapism you can do more than once or twice a year.
Music practice is also what I do to escape, but over the past couple of weeks I also dived into the dark quadrant of family genealogy centered in Texas. My paternal grandfather walked out on his wife & three sons when my dad was 2, heading back to settle in Brownsville near family, and we've never had any contact with or knowledge of that side of the family. This was a neutral fact of life for me for a long time -- it's nice when the shitbird relatives excuse themselves and save you the trouble, right? However, my dad's older brother died of testicular cancer five years ago, and my dad just got diagnosed with prostate cancer this spring (he's 68). This has made everyone a little curious about reproductive cancers running in the family, and I realized I have no knowledge of any female relative on that side other than my sister.
So I went trolling through death certificates and found mostly heart attacks and strokes, although my great-great-grandmother did die of uterine cancer (at age 81). Since I have been preoccupied with the border catastrophe, though, it was also interesting to watch the family records cross it back and forth: my great-grandmother was born in Mexico and met my great-grandfather in San Antonio, probably when they were neighbors a few blocks from the RAICES office where I made a recent donation. But I've never been to Texas.
So that was part distraction, part not.
Congrats lourdes!!!
Escapisms - reading (currently progressing through A Powell with much pleasure) and listening to fiction (EJ Howard's Cazalet Chronicles multi-volume & much better than I'd expected for reasons interesting to reflect on), clearly needing the comfort of longness, also once again promoting backlisted podcast as enjoyable in its own right & great resource. Knitting, walking, bike riding, music listening. Kid reading hilarious bits of Elif Batuman's The Possesed aloud to me 😍😍😍.
Not managing stress adequately - return with a vengeance of migraines & asthma.
Oh yeah, and I make guitar effects pedals. Which, when it goes well, is amazingly satisfying. 90 minutes of soldering and you have something that sounds great, at a fraction of the cost of whatever the boutique fancy dan bought equivalent is.
If it goes badly, it's a total PITA, though. I've probably built 20 or so, in the past year, and there were 2 that were just write-offs, and I was completely unable to work out why they didn't work.
I make guitar effects pedals
TURN UP THE GAIN KNOB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HweKfu0JbA0
FUZZ RITE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9UI92m77bY
Congratulations, Lourdes!
To escape, the best thing is fishing, for prolonged concentration. But sometimes I can't get there. It's a kind of insomnia of the spirit. The harder you try to lose yourself the worse it becomes. Bicycling to exhaustion. Reading well made silly books. Pointless adventures in python or with a raspberry pi, like making a bird cam or a tiny private cloud.
Well I missed my train to get to see Visconti's Ludwig as well but I've preordered Lourdes' book so at least it's not a total wash.
I dug into and loved the new HBS Battletech.
I've been enjoying it as well. I've just decided that the only computer games I'm going to play are turn-based, so I only pick up new games occasionally, and it's been a real treat.
I still have not bought Civ VI. I've just gotten over my Too Much Civ V problem.
48 That sounded more dour than I intended it. "But Lourdes saved the day!" is a bit closer. That and I'm going to watch Annihilation on the TV later tonight.
51: Did you see that in the theatre? I don't think the sound will be quite as effective at home.
52 No, unfortunately Paramount srupidly decided to spike the film so there was no overseas distribution. It's not in theaters anymore so that's my only choice.
I play too damned much Europa Universalis (and to a lesser degree Stellaris and Crusader Kings, both also Paradox Interactive games). It's functionally turn-based, in that it's real-time but you can do stuff while paused. Just wasted too much damned time.
50: I tried jumping from Civ IV to VI and found that I'm not willing to sink that much time into a world conquering. I know that X-Com keeps luring me, but I'm losing interest in micromanaging various cities and worlds in space conquest games.
Hopefully it's just a phase and I'll swing back around again.
56: How similar is EU to Civilization, and where does it differ? I've debated picking it up a few times (Dad enjoyed it), but see above for burnout on micromanaging a bunch of cities/provinces/etc.
I'm very resentful towards Paradox's DLC scam these days. I always supported them back when they were small and I was broke and I feel like they're just fucking with me now.
How similar is EU to Civilization, and where does it differ?
Looking from America, very similar. Differs mostly in Hungary.
EU is more simulationy than gamey, relative to Civ. It's of necessity still quite gamey, but it tries to model history rather than incorporate it.
To avoid having to manage too many things, I always play Civ 5 on low resources with islands and a cold climate. Also, I play as Britain so that I can just Ship of the Line somebody's capital if I get iron and Navigation.
48: Honestly, "at least it's not a total wash" was making me feel pretty good about my effect on the world, given where everyone's expectations are calibrated right now.
I lack the attention span for Civilization, and I'm too old and slow for shooters, but I'm enjoying Fortnite, which you can play like hide-and-seek.
33. I recommend PyCharm Community Edition for your Python development environment needs. Makes Python almost usable. A lot of the errors and such will be caught by it. Parameter and function type annotations can help too.
28. How do you feel about the upcoming WoW expansion? All the pre-info implies that all that work you (presumably?) did in Legion is going to be thrown away in BFA. They do this more or less for every expansion, but for some reason this time bugs me more than the others.
64: Oh for sure, we all use PyCharm and find it totally handy. The hair-tearing is no particular fault of Python, more of a condition inherent to software development. Next time I'll try creating the bugs in a glovebox though.
Periodically, could somebody remind me that uninstalling Twitter from my phone won't help me if I keep reading twitter on the desktop without logging in.
60 is right. EU (and all of the Paradox strategy games) is nominally real time, with a tick representing one day. Games last from 1450 to 1820-ish (although you can pick any starting period within that span). You play as a state that existed during that time period, setting your own goals. Maybe you try to be historical, or maybe England wins the War of the Roses, Austria forms Greater Germany, the Ming Empire colonizes California, Byzantium restores Rome, whatever floats your boat. It is gamey, but much less so than Civ. You're doing small actions to evolve your country in the way you want, worrying about the details of budgets and probabilities of unlikely events. It's intentionally not balanced. (If Oldenburg fights in a war with France, it should lose.)
I don't mind the DLC policy. It keeps the games fresh, they have frequent sales for old expansions, and with how much I've played Paradox's games I'm probably still at less than $0.20/hour of entertainment.
Heebie, you're a mathematician. Do you have any interest in mathematical logic? B/c if so, maybe you might find languages like ML and Haskell interesting?
In theory, yes. I'd love to be a student and take a class and work on small interesting assignments. But in real life, it's a combination of feeling like I lack the ability to concentrate when learning something new and feeling too much like work that means I'd probably just feel guilty for not doing it.
That's pretty much why I don't program for fun. Makes me a bit sad. I've started doing volunteer work for a get-out-the-vote app, though.
On the other hand, since I'm far enough removed from doing any real math, that's still entertaining. Trying to finally get comfortable with Galois theory.
What's the advantage of PyCharm? I went to the webpage and it looked fine but I couldn't see what makes it unusual.
You cannot possibly overstate what a beginner I am, though. I'm working my way through a Codecademy free course and also doing a summer project with students and trying my hand at their little scripts.
On a very basic level, PyCharm checks your work as you go and tries to let you know when you've done something that even a dumb robot can tell makes no sense - forgot to close a parenthesis, mistyped a variable name that you declared farther up, that sort of thing. It can also do things like take you to the body of a function when you click on a reference to it somewhere else, which is handy when you're trying to trace a particular thread of logic through a large codebase.
Can you have several people working on a single project in the free version? And is it cloud-based? And am I incapable of finding the most basic of answers out on my own?
No cloud, you download and run it locally.
Getting several people working together on a project is a bit outside the purview of an IDE like PyCharm; that question takes you into the world of git, which is everyone's frenemy because it's an indispensable tool with an impenetrable command-line interface (and I've never seen a GUI git wrapper that really improves matters). But for collaborative coding it's pretty much de rigueur.
Usually, the tool you do your work in--the IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, which I think is what PyCharm is--is different from the tool you store your project in, a version control system like git or mercurial. So you can store it online and work with other people, or store it locally for your own projects, or back up your online project on github, or whatever. It's only cloud based if you want it to be.
re: 74
It's not cloud-based.
In terms of several people. Sure, if you are checking code into Git (using Git flow -- https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ -- or some other method to handle branching). You can also do collaborative coding in real time using some plugins. Similar things can be done with VS Code, and I assume other things. It's not something I do much -- real time pair programming -- but the team I work in are about to start doing more of it.
I'm actually quite a recent convert to using PyCharm. I use it at work, but for a long time I just used Sublime Text with a couple of plugins to do some basic linting. And I can code quite happily in just Emacs, if I have to. With PyCharm, tbh, I still rarely use a lot of the full features. I don't get deep into using the debugger, for example.
But syntax highlighting, linting, built in code checking, and git integration, are all handy.
I use Eclipse (a different IDE) and I don't know what I'd do without a debugger. It saves me so much time. Ditto find-usages: it makes it so much easier to reason whether a change is safe.
The school is hooking us up with some sort of ssc shell or something (so I'm picturing us all checking email using PINE but maybe that's no longer de rigeur), where we can all access and work on the same project. Which apparently is what our CS department does.
So if I wanted to contribute, a good way to do it would be to do my own little thing over in PyCharm and then copy and paste it to the group project, I'm thinking. But not necessarily to get all the students using PyCharm.
You need version control or you will go crazy.
re: 79
The CS department will definitely be using some sort of version control system, and I'd be very surprised if it's not Git.* So collaborative working probably would involve checking your code into that, using the APIs for that -- you won't necessarily need to know those APIs, your IDA can handle it for you -- rather than anything analogous to cutting and pasting.
* e.g. you check out the latest version of some code, you do a thing, you commit it back to your local version of the code, then you push it back to the server, etc.
But whatever the specifics of how the changes get pushed around, your can certainly use PyCharm for your own little thing without anyone else having to use it.
That's one of the great things about modern systems: the individual developers can use whatever tools they want. Only the code and some parts of the build process are shared.
I need to wait on some vocabulary from my colleague and the tech support people to know what we're doing. I just know it was accessed from an ssc or ssh shell or something, and that they said "we do this on the unix server", but no one's used the word Git for anything except to mean "get".
85: Thank you, really. It's no conversation about version control, but I hope you like it.
I still do everything on my local drive.
I also just remembered that I have an outstanding appointment to keep as a reader, and ordered a copy of Elements of Surprise.
86: "it's a Unix system, I know this".
Folks will recall me complaining last fall about how my non-paying gigs had exploded into unbelievable drama. Some of it is still going on! I'm writing from Idaho, where I meeting tomorrow with the leadership of a Native nation to discuss one of the dramas. Last night, different wilder drama from a different gig!
I went ahead and did a DNA test with Ancestry, hoping to solve a couple of minor mysteries. The one I thought likely to solve has been solved. Bt now a completely new one: a fourth cousin and I have no relationship. Nor do I with someone from a different branch of that same family, fourth cousin to each of us. The way it randomizes, I suppose it might be that I just didn't get any of that DNA. That seems unlikely. I do have DNA from the wife of the fellow -- sibling of the ancestors of the other two folks -- that I should be seeing, so the locus of the mystery is clear enough. (Born in Scotland in the 1840s, died in Boston in the 1930s -- kids born in Scotland in the 1870s). I uploaded the DNA results to GEDmatch, which has all kinds of neat tools, and gives me a bunch of information I don't even pretend to understand. Kind of cool, though, to compare results for two people, and see where on which chromosome the matching sequence falls. What does it mean? I don't know!
Also learned that a second cousin of my dad had a daughter at 17 and put it up for adoption. The daughter is in her late 60s, and is kind of excited to learn the various 17-19th century stories that've come down (and been uncovered) regarding our common ancestry.
If an eagle eats your liver, you have been eaten by a dinosaur.
Stand-up paddle-boarding is my escape. If the water is smooth, I can spend hours poking around the lake.
96: this is endless fascinating. (I wish I could add more coherent commentary, but Moby's tolerance is well beyond me.) do you think the benefits of genealogical genetic services outweigh their aggregation?
(Mobes has left.) Stand-up paddle boarding seems wonderful. I found a blog of someone who paddled the entire length of the Allegheny on one, but it escapes me. None the less, I enjoy kayaking for easy long distance control.
Too drunk to drive, yes. Too drunk to put out the recycling, no.
Of all the planets, Earth is the needy one.
I forgot how much tobacco smoke burns my eyes. Why do humans people up with this?
"nominally real time, with a tick representing one day. Games last from 1450 to 1820-ish"
I just don't feel like I have 350-400 years to spend on a computer game right now.
This seems like a reasonable alternative given the state of NYC mass transit.
74 etc: Heebie, I haven't used it myself, but I think what you want is the tools from Project Jupyter, which lets you combine code and data & normal text in "notebooks", and (most importantly for you) with JupyterHub share access and work on them cooperatively. See more at jupyter.org, or you can see what it looks like on a demo server at jupyter.org/try.
You'd need to have IT set up JupyterHub on a server for you, but it's possible they've already done that for someone else, and if not there's a lot of documentation, and even a bunch of preconfigured virtual machines.
If you wanted to play around with it yourself without waiting for your IT department, you can get yourself a free trial Microsoft Azure account and use their preconfigured virtual machines; documentation here. I was actually intending on doing this but I got distracted.
Oh I almost forgot -- you actually don't need to bother with any of that infrastructure stuff. Microsoft is also just doing free Jupyter notebook hosting themselves at notebooks.azure.com -- you just some sort of Microsoft/Office/Azure account, and you can create and share the notebooks. So yeah, probably not worth bothering with your IT department unless the free Microsoft hosting isn't powerful enough.
Oh, and to the OP, my escapism the last 2 weeks has been studying for the 11 final exams (teaching degree) I'm in the middle of (or procrastinating on that, as now), plus a bit of World Cup.
"nominally real time, with a tick representing one day. Games last from 1450 to 1820-ish"
I just don't feel like I have 350-400 years to spend on a computer game right now.
The only time you play at the lowest speed is during wars, and generally not even then. So it's more like a day a second, usually, or even faster. Even so, a typical EU IV campaign can last dozens of hours.
111-113: poking around a bit (why yes I do have a final exam in 3 hours, why do you ask?), I see that Jupyter Notebooks don't set up version control by default, but, for example, the free hosting interface at notebooks.azure.com lets you import from a Github repository, and then gives you terminal access where you can commit, push, etc.--all from within a browser! So you and your students would still need to learn a bit about Git and version control (this is probably enough) but not too bad.
Heebie, you might want to check out repl.it. It is cloud based, so you can do your programming anywhere, and there's something called repl.it classrooms. On the repl.it forums they say they've released a github integration for repl.it classrooms with Python; I can't poke around too much into that without signing up.
I've turned 131 gyms gold in Pokemon Go.
I have only a dozen gold gyms, but at least one is a Holocaust memorial.
Stupid phone. Drunk me must have unselected "remember personal info."
It just wants to keep you safe, Mobes.
It just wants to keep you safe, Mobes.
88. That's what you do (typically) with Git, as dalriata mentioned in 76. You have to use anything off your own machine if you don't want to, though "pushing" to a remote repository is necessary if you are collaborating.
96. Charley, get the latest issue of Scientific American, which has a long article on DNA testing and how it is essentially pretty inaccurate, and IIRC Ancestry is one of least reliable.
111. I found Jupyter to be confusing and hard to use. Obviously YMMV on these things. My opinion is that it's better to get some understanding of what's going on under the covers (e.g., use Git directly rather than PyCharm's command wrappers), because then you a better chance to understand what just went wrong. Jupyter just took that Russian Doll to a new level. Also, the notebook part is a good idea but the implementation is less good, IMHO.
Maybe I should try it again. I had to learn it and use it during a "hackathon," so there was a lot of time pressure.
124.1. Argh! "You don't have to ..."
65
28. How do you feel about the upcoming WoW expansion? All the pre-info implies that all that work you (presumably?) did in Legion is going to be thrown away in BFA.
I'm looking forward to the reset, personally. In Legion I got overloaded by multiple characters. In previous expansions I raided on Normal and Heroic on my main, only really played 2-4 alternate characters at all, and parked them in cities as soon as they hit max level in most cases. In Legion, I got all the class mounts and completed all the Mage Tower challenges. If you're familiar with the game, that's a lot of experience with every class.
I also spent a lot of time doing the same dungeons and quest chains over and over again on multiple characters and mailing stuff back and forth between characters. I'm sick of that for a while. I want to immerse myself in Battle for Azeroth with one character, or one on each faction at the most, long before I do it on 3+. I don't want to split myself in too many different directions.
IIRC Ancestry is one of least reliable.
I don't know anything about this, but AIHMB, a good friend of mind discovered a half-brother via Ancestry.com. Turns out his father had an affair before his marriage to my friend's mother. The father claims to have not known about the child, and the child's mother got married to someone else right away -- nearly 70 years ago. They met (father and half-brothers) in Atlanta a few months ago.
They should stress that kind of thing in the commercials. "Uncover the sins of the past before the oldsters die and you can't make fun of them."
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I plan on being at the End Family Separation protest starting at Foley Square tomorrow morning at 10 AM tomorrow at Foley Square: https://www.facebook.com/events/402075813606761/
Some other NYC based commenters and FPPers will also be there and we're intending to meet up for it.
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126. Sounds a lot like what I did, except I only pushed my main through everything and I don't raid all that much, though my guild does. My two other 110s got started on Legion but I didn't have time or energy to push them all the way through. Sort of glad I didn't do their artifact weapons as fully as they are going to be trash soon.
I did the BFA prep stuff (takes maybe a half hour) on my main last night.
128. It's their DNA tests (and especially the ethnicity-related ones) that SciAm called out as inaccurate. They weren't all that positive about any of the companies doing those. I had the Nat. Geo. DNA tests done in their first version of them. Didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but it was interesting.
128: Everybody is delighted by the whole thing. I think my friend's mother would not have approved, but she passed away a number of years ago. I assumed that an old white guy in Atlanta was going to be a Trump supporter, but no. So a happy ending for everybody.
I discovered (well, technically my aunt did, but) a half-sister in Delaware from when my father donated sperm as a Duke medical student and her parents got in vitro therapy there. We're Facebook friends now. My mother said there could be as many as four more out there, because at five implantations, they stopped using any one donor's material
donated sperm as a Duke medical student
Masturbating on the people mover?
124.3: I never warmed up to Jupyter notebooks either, although everyone seems to love them.
I recommend Anaconda for anyone who plans to use lots of packages that are not included in the standard Python distribution. Package installation/management was the one thing about Python that I hated, but Anaconda makes it easy.
Heebie, I haven't used it myself, but I think what you want is the tools from Project Jupyter, which lets you combine code and data & normal text in "notebooks", and (most importantly for you) with JupyterHub share access and work on them cooperatively.
We've been using Jupyter notebooks using cocalc, which some math people like, and it's been slow, so we hadn't included the students. I hadn't realized that "Jupyter" was the key word that we could seek elsewhere.
Surely the pain inflicted by the sight of that name outweighs any possible use value.
I heard they tore down the people mover.
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North Americans: archeology or archaeology?
I'm having a crisis of conscience here.
|>
This is the first time I noticed there are two ways to spell it.
You're Catholic. You should have more experience with these things.
Archaeology is the generally standard spelling. Archeology is also used, mostly by federal government agencies. Both are considered correct and interchangeable.
Just like psychology and psyachology.
Archaeology. The least logical spelling is always correct in English.
Ugh. I'm going to have to be laissez-faire. My eyes shall burn at every encounter.
150: You're very sensitive, aren't you? You must have to be very careful when surfing the web.
152: Only in work hours.
They actually know "æ", but it's the IPA æ, which is not the one in archæology.
Ngram Viewer shows "archaeology" as maybe 8x the frequency of "archeology", limiting the corpus to American English. "Archeology" is almost nonexistent in their British English data.
Minivet I minilove you. Fuck laissez-faire it's pedant time.
they stopped using any one donor's material
I believe the technical term is "spermélange."
Do archeologists dig up medieval fetuses?
Listen to this question on the Texas test to be able to register voters:
Which of the following is not a qualification to register to vote?
a. Applicant is a United States citizen
b. Applicant is a resident of the county
c. Applicant is 17 years old
d. Applicant is a felon and has completed all phases of punishment
I think the correct answer is c, because you have to be 17 years, ten months old. The corresponding training slide says:
A volunteer deputy register may distribute and accept a completed voter registration application from any resident of the county who is:
• a United State citizen;
• a resident of the county;
• at least 17 years and 10 months of age;
• not a convicted felon (unless the person's sentence has been completed, including probation or parole or the person has been pardoned or otherwise released from the resulting disability to vote);
• not a person determined by a final judgment of a court exercising probate jurisdiction to be (1) totally mentally incapacitated; or (2) partially mentally incapacitated without the right to vote.
(Note: I'm not saying this is Texas Being Difficult Jerks - I think this is well-meaning bureaucrats getting tangled in their double-negative bureaus. STILL!)
d. is tricky, because someone in that category is not disqualified from voting, that fact just isn't an active qualification. That's a funny question, though. Less in the 'let's make sure you know this' vein and more 'let's make the test hard.'
You're Catholic. You should have more experience with these things.
That's only relevant if you're asking about paedophile vs pedophile.
Whence the 17 & 10 rule? Surely simpler "Applicant's is 18 or older, or will have 18th birthday before the next election." Or better yet, no age requirement for registration, just have ID showing age on election day.
I bet they have to be registered two months before the election, so it's a weird way of saying '18th birthday before the next election'.
||
So I was going to take the train out to Brooklyn to catch First Reformed at BAMcinematek only the train was 10 minutes late which means I'd miss my connection at Jamaica to Atlantic Terminal and miss the film, I contemplated going in just to see the Bowie exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum but decided to head out on the east of LI and see some old friends. None of whom were around. And when I stopped at a drugstore to pick up a card for my parents' 55th wedding anniversary after I backed out an old woman clipped me. I stupidly didn't call the cops for a report because it's my brother's car (he's selling it and letting me drive it while I'm here) and I couldn't find a current insurance card in the side panel. I had thought it was a mutual fault that we both backed out at the same time and I said I'd take care of it assuming only a couple hundred dollars in damage to her rear bumper (it was slight but would probably have to be replaced) and didn't see damage on my brother's car until I got home. Rear side panel and around the rear wheel well is freshly damaged. So she backed out into me after I was already fully backed out. Now she's claiming it cost $1,000 when you can find replacement bumpers for her 'new' car (it's a 2014) for about $150.
IOW FML
|>
I too has a near-total failure of planning today. No asshole drivers though. (I mean, thousands of asshole drivers, but I didn't have to deal with them.)
I bet they have to be registered two months before the election, so it's a weird way of saying '18th birthday before the next election'.
But it's an extra strict way of saying this - it prohibits me for registering someone in June, if their birthday is in October.
Coming back to dna, my supposition is that the sequencing is done by a vendor, probably the same vendor for Ancestry as the others. No less professional, anyway. What Ancestry has to be inaccurate about is its algorithm to estimate ethnicity, about which I only barely care. I'm a little intrigued by the suggestion that I'm 14% Scandinavian because so far as is known, that's all the result of Viking invasions of Britain and France. I suppose they might be inaccurate as well in suggesting that some given person might be a 4-6 cousin, or another might be 5-8. But I think this is just based on the length of a shared strand, so on that they're applying the textbook thinking.
Gedmatch let's you look at the underlying data a lot more closely, and seems to be interoperable so as more people upload to it, and the database grows, it will be better.
164: That sucks, Barry!
Aren't you leaving the country soon? Can you just pretend it didn't happen?
Also, too bad about First Reformed. Probably my favorite movie that I've seen this year.
164: That shouldn't be hard to fix. Your brother needs to call his insurance company (I'm assuming he has coverage) and they'll work it out with this lady. You have her contact info, obviously, since she wants money from you. His insurance can extract payment from hers and pay out what you owe. It should be no big deal. Really.
158. They still allow tests to register to vote? I thought that was no longer okay. There was this thing called the Voting Rights Act when I was younger. Did it get repealed?
Anyway, I hate tests like that, and had to take several of them to ensure I didn't sleep through a couple of training modules. They ask a few questions where you check the answer that isn't true (like the example above), and there are several plausible ones to pick from that are nit-picky idiocy that any sane person would just look up if they were unsure. Worse, they had a "check all that are true" one where one answer they obviously wanted in fact wasn't true.
I passed easily but I was really annoyed at those questions and gave 'em heck in the training evaluation. Not that that will matter.
TL;DR: The VRA is not a corporate training module. Yet.
I think the test isn't to be able to register to vote but to be able to register other people as voters.
170 may be even better advice than 169.2
172 is right. It's to become a volunteer deputy registrar.
Here's a fun rule: all VDRs expire on December 31st of every even year.
Here's another: your VDR status is only good in your county. If you want to register voters in another county, you have to apply to that county separately.
All best practices to get as much participation as possible, surely!
at five implantations, they stopped using any one donor's material
Then they batch it and let the magic of intra-uterine sperm competition do its work.
170 Thanks ydnew. That makes me feel better. It is insured. My brother just sent me the PDF of the card but I couldn't find a current one at the time. Still miffed I didn't see the damage at the time and agreed not to call the police and get a report.
176: Most people wouldn't have called the police for minor damage, I think. Glad it's insured and you have her contact info. It'll work out easily, probably only small cost to you or your brother.
She was probably hopped up on goofballs and meth.
The CS department will definitely be using some sort of version control system
A surprisingly large and eminent CS department wasn't, eight years ago, according to two of their grad students. Neither was the computer engineering department as far as they knew which was even more terrifying. C-x M-c M-butterfly, I guess.
(If we had a pool, I would at this point expect heebie's IT department to be running subversion, which I think is a perfectly good approach for the problem if maybe suboptimal for their students first job interviews.)
That is a handsome and appealing cover;
Pre-ordered;
If a whole lot of people go for the sonnets, do we reprobates get to help with them?
Reprobate contributed sonnet:
There once as a poet from London
who got sick and then died young.
He said with a grin, as he coughed up some phlegm,
"My lungs are such shit. Fuck them."
There should be a hyphen between "reprobate" and "contributed." I apologize for the error.
Thank you, clew!
Thank you, Moby! I will write out a few dozen copies of that in fancy calligraphy and send them to everyone.
No, um, to my knowledge I have (Keats has) a backlog of ~10 sonnets I am (Keats is) supposed to write; some have specified topics, but a lot of them are ad libitum. If any of your reprobates are feeling sonnety, of course, give it a go! Gift economy!
Per the Ruts thread my escapism has mostly been to involve myself in a handful of physical pursuits, including some new ones with learning curves, so as to attempt to minimize stewing time. Also some volunteering. I sort of made light of the voter registration stuff, but it really seems to be one of the few routes I can see. (And am in an organization that participates in Naturalization ceremonies here and then trys to register as many new citizens as possible after the ceremony--far and away the most positive "political" thing I've experienced for years.) I keep trying to think of what could be a legal and effective way to deploy the Amway model to registering and getting people to vote.
For better or worse I have not found myself in front of a computer nearly as much as I was before. (And not just not at work, but at home as well.) But this has led me to not really starting my goal of picking up programming again (also for better or worse). I had begun learning and writing in Python a few years back but then got involved in some extremely consuming work activities that blew that up. I have considered trying to reboot in Clojure (I think recommended here by snarkout) as the language I was most familiar with in past lives was Common Lisp. Have been reading up and doing a few exercises in Clojure, but so far I am mostly struck by the smug righteousness of its practitioners (or at least the ones I've read). They seem to need to pontificate on the correctness and superiority of Clojure at every turn rather than just getting on with explaining it* (although I am intellectually intrigued by the approach**). So maybe I will stick with trying to get up to speed on Python for now and see if I want to ascend to the lofty heights of Clojure later.
*Hallmark of pretentious assholes*** the world over.
**I think because I am an aspirational pretentious asshole.
*** Not saying whoever mentioned it here is a pretentious asshole. Especially not if it was snarkout.
And so to the local March and then over to the convention center for a Pickleball tournament. My wife and I contain multitudes (of contradictions).
I don't even know what Pickleball is, so I'm going to assume it's drug slang.
Stormcrow is highly respectable. It must be competitive food preservation.
Old racist white people hitting a whiffleball around mini-tennis courts. (The article I linked recently on The Villages was titled "Pickleball Generation.")
Actually my wife and several other players had a female rage therapy session between games yesterday; but it can be tricky figuring out who's safe.
Pittsburgh event at a place dominated by a liud fountain ... (not The Point).
185. Fans of obscure programming languages are a lot like fans of obscure indie-rock bands, aren't they?
re: 185
The husband of a former work colleague is a Clojure dev (and is branching into less mainstream functional languages now) and makes a lot of money doing it. So it might be quite niche, but somewhere, there's cash in it.
Whereas, at my company, almost everyone does Python. All of the non-Python devs, also dabble in Python.**
** although, tbf, there's probably really only three of us who are good at it.
The slide says:
You may assist any resident of the county in completing a voter registration application, if he/she cannot read, or has a physical disability.
The test says:
An applicant needs help filling out the voter registration application and has asked you for assistance. Is this acceptable?
a. Yes
b. No
Why is this so hard?
From what I understand, I think the policy is generally understood to be "Yes" - a broad range of people can ask you for help and you can help them, not the narrow range on the slide, and the slide is meant to be examples. But still!
The answer is either yes or maybe, so 'no' has to be wrong.
It's really fortunate that each Texan wishing to register other Texans to vote has access to their own website full of extremely smart people who will help them and empathize with them in parsing clunky phrasing on the test.
OT: A friend and former colleague did me, what we used to call 'a solid' when I was looking for work. I would like to respond with a token of gratitude. However, I don't have his physical address and I haven't seen him in five years. Should I send him like a certificate by email or ask for the address? Also, what should I get? He's from China if that helps.
I think target gift cards make good generic gifts, because they have a cliche of people being unable to resist making impulse buys there, but they've also got plenty of generic shit. In general, for teacher gifts, baby gifts, etc, we first try to do something local, but in the absence of that, Target is usually the most practical thing in my book.
If you're the kind of person who needs to have a solution FAST or else you'll never get around to it, send them a Target gift card. Or a Starbucks gift card - feels more like a present, but more likely to be something that the recipient doesn't actually want.
Does he live in the same city as you?
He lives in your state, but not your city.
196: Ask for his physical address; send a consummable gift (food, drink, fruit basket). Heebie's right if you just want to get it done, but I think a physical gift is more the norm. Also, lots of employers have ethics rules about gifts that exempt food items.
just to update those of you sitting on the edges of your seats as I learn tiny bits about dna genealogy, I uploaded my file to myheritage, which lets you see which stretch of which chromosome you share with someone else in their database. the software isn't quite as powerful as it might be, in terms of finding everyone sharing this one stretch of chromosome 6, but that'll come, I suppose. obviously, having an identical stretch of chromosome 6 doesn't mean one is related, but it does make intuitive sense to me that the longer the identical sequence is, the less likely it's random. some years from now, I imagine it will be possible to tag that portion of chromosome 6 to the earliest common ancestor of the however many people in some vast database have it. there'll have to be a whole lot more data out there for this to work, but, obviously, that's the direction the vector points.
I was hoping to send food, but I don't think employer rules apply because it's 'a solid'.
201: What I meant was that even if ethics rules do apply (some are really strict), food will be exempt but a gift card wouldn't.
Send slaves, exotic animals, or exquisite and rare spices.
201 was maybe not deserving of a serious reply, being mostly an attempt to imply that ethnics rules don't apply for actions described in 1970s slang.
I'm assuming he won't tell his employer because the specific details of the solid, while completely legal and ethical, are probably not something he wants them to know.
OT: I have eaten all of the mussels.
Except that one that didn't open up. I released him back into the water.
Gee, thanks Mobes. Good thing mussels reproduce asexually, so that sole survivor can repopulate the ocean. Oh no wait, nevermind.
"Even those from red families were more likely than my acquaintances in New York to know someone who has had a child out of wedlock or is subject to a restraining order." (emphasis added)
Thus says an oped writer in the frigging NYTimes in a piece fulminating on how Trump's family values align with many in the heartland.
This from the same NYTimes that as I understand it had the marches on Page A19 while above the fold they had Jonathan Martin/Alex Burns vomiting up stale "dems in disarray" BS based on Ocasio-Cortez.
Now back to your regularly-scheduled escapism.
I've seen plenty of people bitching about that article, but I'm probably never going to read it.
A third model can be found among working-class whites, blacks and Hispanics -- let's call it purple. In these families, bonds between mothers and children are prized above those between couples.
I like "among working class whites, blacks and Hispanics." I finally understand how Trump got so much of the black vote.
213: I think he has roots in Nebraska and and uses friends and acquaintances there as his exemplars of Trumpoidian family values. (I sort of just scanned the article quickly... the whole thing sucked, but the restraining order thing was particularly weird and damning.)
That's most of why I'm not reading it. In case I know his family.
I think it's gotten better, I don't know whether because of secret abortions or new-found moral rectitude or because the old guy died so the drug store now carries condoms, but there were so many pregnancies in high school when I was there.
bonds between mothers and children are prized above those between couples
In the upper classes, the wife will sometimes go to the store to buy whisky for her husband and forget to vaccinate the kids.
I thought genuine white people were strictly patrilineal?
Also, I thought genuine Americans drank whiskey?
Huh, that piece was maddening, but it was somewhat less horrifying than the author who left her wife for her therapist while said wife was at the lowest point of chemo for breat cancer. The piece is written about how to apologize really well. The endnote: "Cris Beam is the author of 'I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy.'" It was the first time I've ever wanted to read comments, but alas, they were closed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/opinion/sunday/apologizing-apologies.html
Genuine Americans are approximate about spellin.
221: If you want to do that, just email Newt Gingrich for tips.
223: That's exactly what the boyfriend said.
Al Franken has a really funny bit about it in one of this books.
OT: I have eaten all of the mussels.
The ones in the icebox?!
Tell you what, when you bring the mussels back from extinction, that's when you get to diss my satire.
Their seeds need to pass through my digestive tract in order to germinate.
NYT had a Trump interview yesterday and initially headlined it with one of his claims without even a "Trump says..." so for a while the top headline on their site was "Dem calls to abolish ICE will help GOP in fall election." Just put out there as a statement of fact. They've since added an "according to Trump."
I bet that, in its bid to welcome our new red-state value overlords, the NYT would have said "tactical pants" instead of "cargo pants."
Once upon a time, in my misspent youth, I spent a long and boring day upon a peri-urban plot owned by family acquaintances. Upon said plot were grown numerous cycads for sale, among them a subspecies (or some such) of which only the female (or perhaps male) survived, entailing the eventual (though very distant, given the extraordinary longevity of cycads) extinction of said subspecies (or some such). This made me sad.
The Times is really amazing at trolling. Like, the only thing that draws baffled eyerolls about Trump's family is that his voters have spent the last thirty years fulminating about fidelity and sexual morality (Clinton) and the importance of the two-parent heterosexual family (gay marriage). Upper middle class people tend to have more stable relationships than poorer people (although we too have complicated family structures with drama. Ask me anything! but not onblog), but upper middle class liberals don't primarily organize politics around constraining other people's relationship decisions.
So that op-ed is just an astonishingly skilled 'the problem with liberals is that you're the ones who aren't tolerant of other people's unusual family structures', which leaves us all with whiplash, saying "but... wha?"
221: That's quite a thing. I am intrigued by the end of his relationship with the therapist: "who had ended things in a violent way." He feels he is owed an apology.
Also, his ex-wife: "I forgive you," she said. She didn't add out loud: "Now please go the fuck home and leave me alone."
My wife has pretty much given up on the NYT because of their toxic combination of trolling, reader-negging ("you're doing your life wrong!"), and clickbait. We still get it on paper because I can't stand not having a physical paper and you can only ragequit once.
I felt as if I couldn't possibly keep giving them money after the 2016 election -- I'll read around their paywall if someone links, but I can't possibly pay them. (Also, congratulations on the gold medal for your homebrew cider!)
Sorry, not gold medal, Cidermaker of the Year.
239: My wife subscribes (digitally) to the NYT and the Post so I get the household "free ride" there.
Cider, hooray. More of a fall thing for me, though I don't know why.
I vaguely hoped the article would be a veiled takedown, "Trump has family values in the sense that he believes women are property and property has value, and many Americans feel the same way", but no such luck.
I gave up on the NYT after November 2016 and have never looked back or missed it at all, though I do read around the paywall sometimes after a link. And pay for their crossword puzzle app. Strongly encourage people to just give it up -- ansolutely nothing in it you can't get elsewhere (unless maybe you live in NYC, not sure about that).
Nah, if you want local news, NY1 covers things just fine.
I subscribe to the local paper. New Yorkers must have some local paper they can subscribe to if they don't consider the NYT to be such a thing. How about Newsday?
I hear good things about NY1.
NY1 just isn't the same if it isn't printed out as a series of transcripts.
I or someone else has probably mentioned this before, but the Washington Post has an excellent digital access deal for Amazon Prime members: six months free, then $4/month thereafter. It doesn't allow sharing between accounts, though.
Newsday is LI. For a while (late eighties throught sometime in the nineties) they had a city edition which I thought was great, but it didn't make money and shut down. And there are always the News and the Post, but they're both terrible (although the News' front-page headline game is solid the last few years).
I became convinced that the NYT was for someone other than me during the Whitewater coverage, and haven't seen anything to disabuse me of that since. I'm amazed, though, that the paper's response to the huge uptick in subscriptions after the 2016 election has been to double down on trolling the readership. Do they not understand why all those people wanted to read the paper? Not care? Both?
237: SHE, sexist. (I misread it the same way.)
I don't think a therapist is supposed to have sex with a client regardless of anybody's gender.
I didn't want to google the rule from work, so I guess I could be wrong.
I've read several of Beam's books, most recently her memoir/polemic about being a foster parent. I'm curious whether her new book will address getting through the homestudy process while disclosing the therapist-relationship portion if not all the rest.
252: It's official: I'm an old white man who can't keep up.
Have you tried engaging a younger therapist?
Anyway, obviously being a therapist is a good way to find somebody on the rebound before anybody else can get themselves in on the sweet desperation action.
Instead of making light of the problems of therapists who break up their clients' relationships, we could make light of Alan Dershowitz's pain at being shunned by Martha's Vineyardians.
"Pop quiz hot shot. You're on Martha' Vineyard, standing outside a restaurant unable to get a table even though you had a reservation because Michael Bloomberg just walked in with six extra people in his party. They're saying they can seat you in two hours but just then you hear a voice that is Dershowitz saying 'there's room for two at my table'. What do you do? What do you do?"
"Shoot the maître d'."
It would be SO MUCH fun to be in a position to shun Alan Dershowitz. Never let it be said that success is without its rewards.
I don't even know what state Martha's Vineyard is in. That is not a request for information. Don't ruin my heartland nature.
That's either my moral grounding or my laxative. Either way, vital.
A man from Martha's Vineyard said:
"Ditch Nantucket, try us instead,
Ours aren't as long,
But you can't go wrong,
We'll do anything to get ahead."
When a hack on an isle near Nantucket
Came near, his neighbors said fuck it
If MAGA you say
You must go away
And so was his social life cuck'd.
Seen on twitter:
Dismayed, Mr. Dershowitz cited
A serious wrong to be righted:
The New England rich
Having parties to which
Mr. Dershowitz isn't invited.
There was an old man from nantucket
Fuck you Alan Dershowitz you motherfucking craven Harvard piece of shit may God forgive you because no one else should I hope your "friends" spit on your motherfucking torture supporting grave
Ba bum ba ba bum ba ba ba bum
Does NY not have "hyperlocal" blogs/twitter feeds that are more useful than a city-wide paper? I don't read any London local paper, because they are all shite and/or run by the architects of the country's misery. My local news mainly comes from blogs about South East London, transport-focussed sites like London Reconnections, and periodic Twitter searches for "Deptford" and "Greenwich"
Where the gingers are yellow, the greens find harbor, and the departments wade the river.
269: Please see me after class if you don't understand the assignment.
When he was a social lion at Martha's Vineyard, Dershowitz didn't mind shunning other people. "I rarely invite my academic colleagues," Dershowitz told New York. "Most of them don't make good dinner guests."
https://newrepublic.com/minutes/149551/alan-dershowitz-really-victim-marthas-vineyard-mccarthyism
What is the history of this Dershowitz character anyway? I remember him being one of OJ's lawyers when I was young. He seemed like one of the many people only famous for being in the OJ trial. But since then, he has continued being famous as a vague elitist figure of pure evil, like a legal-academic Henry Kissinger.
I was surprised to see in that link that Larry David was divorced. If he can't make marriage work, what hope is there for the rest of us?
What galls me is the hypocrisy of people that claim to be against torture, and yet would sentence Alan Dershowitz to spend an entire evening alone with his conscience.
would sentence Alan Dershowitz to spend an entire evening alone with his conscience.
Table for one, please.
276: I will say that he has had an interesting career in terms of causes and legal representation. But the assholery and star-fucking has been constant.
Notables represented or advised:
Harry Reems (male star of Deep Throat)
Klaus von Bulow
OJ Simpson
Jeffrey Epstein - the rich underage girls guy with connections to *lots* of politicians.
Has supporterd:
Torture.
Whatever crazy ass thing Israel is up to at any given moment.
Duke Lacrosse guys.
Did write a book blasting the Supremes after Bush v. Gore
Said that Ted Cruz was one of the most brilliant students he ever had.
Has been accused of sexual abuse. (I have no idea how credibly.)
In checking something about him I came across this interesting article about an event he attended on ... Martha's Vineyard last year.
"Trump criticized at Martha's Vineyard event" His comments to the press.
Dershowitz said he had been ambivalent about removing Confederate statues -- "I don't like rewriting history" -- but when Trump used the term "culture" in his post-Charlottesville remarks, he was persuaded they needed to go. Statues glorifying the Confederacy should be moved to museums, Dershowitz said, "where they can be seen in historical context and understood."
Asked if he agreed, Blow did an epic eye-roll and said, "You can put them wherever you want," which elicited snickers from the crowd at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown.
Dershowitz sounded sanguine despite the president's comments about Charlottesville.
"I believe the near universal condemnation of what President Trump has said and done has been louder than the voice of the president himself, and that's rare thing," he said.
Dershowitz sounded sanguine despite the president's comments about Charlottesville.
The blood label.
Those are important. Only the one type is a universal donor.
Anyway, it's good to know that Ohio State's turn in the Big Ten athletic program sexual assault scandal also involves a Republican member of Congress.
Dershowitz is rabidly pro-Likud and a civil liberties absolutist. Early in his career, I think the latter tendency was laudable and useful, but nowadays, his absolutism is deployed exclusively in the service of the powerful. So for instance, per Dershowitz, there is no conceivable circumstance under which Michael Cohen's communications with Trump should be available to prosecutors.
286: civil liberties absolutist
Apparently that doesn't extend to the right not to be tortured. Or maybe it's just that civil liberties don't extend to Muslims.
There is a certain intellectual tension created by the simultaneous embrace of Likud and civil libertarianism.
Yes the discussion on the simultaneous embrace between Likud and civil libertarian is quite relevance and my concern is related to having more focus an more discussion on the similar topic as well.