I have a story. It was late out and dark already and the kids were exhausted but also amped up and fragile. For some reason one of them asked me if I was a robot. So I said, "No, of course not," and pretended to glitch by letting my head fake-spasm towards my shoulder a couple times in a row.
The kids started screaming and screaming and screaming and truly lost their minds. They were sobbing and terrified. It was worse than when we watched WandaVision. Then when I tried to comfort them, that was terrifying too. (I guess that's exactly what a glitching robot would do to try to hide the fact that it was a glitching robot from its human children?)
Anyway, eventually they calmed down and got shuffled off to bed. I think they currently think I am not a glitching robot, but I'm not sure. We are never allowed to talk about this again.
What an awkward time for the servo mechanisms in your neck to glitch.
It never bothered me that you're a robot. How are the little plague rats doing?
They're disquieted but otherwise healthy.
Well yeah, I imagine finding out mom is a robot is unnerving. Glad to hear that they are otherwise healthy.
I really thought my kids were the only ones who couldn't process sarcasm, irony and Parent Jokes. ("Dad Jokes" is sexist.)
Signed our kid up for a wind instrument in school band, which might be the riskiest thing he's doing (Maybe. Depending on how they're managing lunch at the school, among other things.) Tough balance among the obvious risks, the dubiousness of the mitigations (mask-fabric over instrument bells, kids playing through slits in a mask - research says that they have some effect), vaccination coming in a couple of months with any luck, and the risk of being forever left behind if you don't start an instrument when the rest of the kids do (or so I'm told. I missed this whole play-an-instrument thing in school and have never figured out why).
6: Maybe there is copper than can kill any COVID?
At my school the kids who started late had to play percussion.
My kids are so cynical I think I could have a heart attack or fall down the stairs and they'd just think it was another joke.
Cynicism! I couldn't come up with the word for the thing my kids lack. That's it!
No copper can take me in alive.
At my school the kids who started late had to play percussion.
Foolishness! Apparently decent drummers are always in demand. (Or so says my nephew, who can pick up pretty much anything and play it, and who funded various bits of his education playing with a bands of one sort or another.)
Still, look what happened to Pete Best.
Rose to be training manager for job center in Liverpool . Not bad.
I'm almost halfway through Eve's Hollywood, and it's enjoyable and not what I expected. In the foreward of the edition I bought, the foreward-writer quoted someone saying "in every young man's life there is an Eve Babitz. Usually it's Eve Babitz" which was amusing. Maybe because of that I expected, I guess, a kiss and tell? Through the first 100 pages there are only three kisses, though, and they're not the focus. Eve's lively takes on Hollywood, and people there, in a very personal writing style...it's holding my interest so far.
I was going to look up how it went for his band mates but I was distracted and now I can't remember if it was Lennon and Mccarthy or Lenin and McCartney or what.
My mother has belatedly contracted COVID but seems to be sailing through it with no more than headache and vague fatigue. Double jab FTW. My father hasn't got it yet and they are living on separate floors of the house, which, along with the self isolation, is turning out to be the worst part for them.
Our school's testing disaster continued today. At 10 am they sent an email saying that 9th graders should all be tested between 8 and 11 am. They did not provide instructions about where to find the time machine.
They did so well in the spring it's bizarre to see this. The district does have a new superintendent this school year but I'm having trouble imagining how one person could be responsible for such a switch from competence to idiocy.
I'm having trouble imagining how one person could be responsible for such a switch from competence to idiocy
Did you miss what happened in the White House from 2017 to 2021?
Incidentally "Free Guy" is good fun, but it's just dawned on me that it is "The Matrix" but the cool people in sunglasses who blow everything up are the baddies, and the machines are nice.
I am in the office today for the first time. It's a 13 mile cycle each way, from the far west of London to Clerkenwell. The distance itself isn't a problem. I've cycled into work a few times on weekends to check out the route. But doing it in rush hour with an insanely heavy backpack, is much less fun. I budgeted for about an hour, which I didn't think would be challenging--it takes me about 50 minutes unladen--but it ended up taking more like an hour and ten. If I end up doing it more than a couple of times a month, I'll need to invest in a fancy rack or something similar, or just get the tube in once a week and deposit a load of clothes, etc.
If you need to have a working time machine to be competent, then we're all in trouble.
Grandparent achievement unlocked last week. All doing well.
I hope the surrounding covid issues are better.
My genes are like "All right, then.."
Yeah, I think everyone now has 2 vaccine doses and those who contracted it have recovered. The overall community is still pretty high. however. We'll visit in a couple of weeks.
I heard that until all the liberals apologize for suggesting people get vaccinated, nobody is getting vaccinated.
ttaM, I thought "invest in" was a joke until I clicked through and found they want £689 for a rack with two panniers and a bag on top.
re: 33
When I priced up the option that would work for me* it was less than that, but yeah, it's very expensive. That said, you wouldn't get much change out of 200-250 quid for ordinary waterproof panniers, rack, and top bag.
* alloy rack, 2 x panniers, no top bag. About 375 quid.
re: 33
And I would save the cost in a couple of months, even assuming I didn't go in more than a few times a week.
I'm only three miles from the office, so I'm thinking of commuting by the electric scooters you see everywhere. The problem is that I still fear death.
Congrats JP!
Last month I picked up just exactly such a basic rack with trunk bag and panniers for a couple hundred, and took it into the office for the first time on Friday. It's a fairly flat eight-mile ride which for me is 50 minutes; the problem, it turns out, is that my morning routine has gotten a lot more complicated since I was last in the office, and by the time I was done putting on makeup and flouncing I had to take my bike on the train in order to get there on time.
Great for picking up groceries on the way home, though. I have not tired of saying that I will put paneer in my panniers.
37.
It was of course very difficult for us to know what to say or how to open a conversation when all of us knew what the surgery had shown. Fermi resolved the gloom by turning to me and saying, "For a man past fifty, nothing essentially new can happen and the loss is not as great as one might think. Now tell me, will I be an elephant next time?"
Can an elephant pay for a child's college education?
Many employers offer reasonably priced term life insurance. If you are sufficiently concerned about that, you can share your scooter route with someone who dislikes you.
I don't want to provide any moral hazards.
I just realized I forgot to update the date on this check-in, in the OP title.
Oh wait, the last one was dated 9/14. I did update the date, just unconventionally.
So, you're telling me today isn't 9/16?
It's 9:16 am. You're looking at your clock.
Is it snakes or hamsters that only need fed once a week?
1: OMG that's funny. Do you find there's a difference in how your kids take jokes like that? The Calabat is very serious and tends to presume that people are speaking in earnest, so shiv can usually get a rise out of him by making an outlandish claim whereas Pebbles immediately figures out the joke and recently has added going all in. The Calabat would have been mildly freaked out by your robot impression for a second and would welcome being reassured that you're not a robot while pretending he played it cool. Pebbles would have stared at you and then started glitching herself, daring you to call her on it.
They're both home today with a bad cough that has turned out not to be COVID, which is both reassuring (yay! no novel virus) and annoying (hell, we haven't gotten it yet and it feels inevitable.)
You can feed snakes a hamster once a week.
They are all very good at joking around with me, especially Ace and Pokey, but they have zero tolerance for anything remotely spooky. For example, we recently read Emil and the Detectives, which is set in 1920s in Germany. The villain wears a bowler hat. There's one tense scene, early on, where you kind of know he's going to steal Emil's money. Emil falls asleep, and when he wakes up, his money is gone.
But of course, by 2020 there's this cartoon stereotype of the villain with the long waxed mustache and bowler hat, and the Geeblets all freaked out over the bowler hat. They found this so freaky that they wanted to abandon the book. I switched it to "baseball cap" and kept on going. As soon as we survived that scene, we were fine. (Although I was a bit bored by how the book goes on for chapter after chapter, long after the villain is caught.) They are the fragilest of flowers when it comes to any sort of suspense in a children's movie.
In fact, when I was pretending to be a robot, Rascal was facing the wrong way and didn't even see me. It was just the other kids screaming their heads off that made him equally scared.
The elementary schools here just decided that they're going to close an hour early every day because the teachers are overburdened covering absences and hiring people is hard. I can't make the new pickup time, and I'm not having any luck finding someone to hire-- they are all either in class or working the newly expanded aftercares, who got advance notice of this change. He can't tolerate the chaos in the aftercares, even if I could get a slot. No clue how I'm going to manage the next 3 months.
This is the greatest story ever told: it was an exploding meteorite that did for Sodom and Gomorrah:
An unusual 3600-year-old charcoal-rich destruction layer at Tall el-Hammam marks the sudden abandonment of a Middle-Bronze-Age urban center in the Jordan Valley close to the north end of the Dead Sea. Across the 30-km-wide lower Jordan Valley, 15 other cities and > 100 smaller villages were simultaneously abandoned at the end of the Middle Bronze Age to remain largely uninhabited for ~ 300-600 years. The remains of this ancient city and adjacent areas appear to be unique compared with those of other times, pointing to the occurrence of some highly unusual catastrophic event. The primary purpose of our research here has been to attempt to resolve this mystery.
NW, that is a great comment except that the link appears to point not to the greatest story ever told but to a (great) comment by some guy called NW.
That is indeed one hell of a read. They don't mention it but the hypersalinity effect reminded me instantly of what happened to Lot's wife.
That is indeed one hell of a read. They don't mention it but the hypersalinity effect reminded me instantly of what happened to Lot's wife.
That is indeed one hell of a read. They don't mention it but the hypersalinity effect reminded me instantly of what happened to Lot's wife.
That is indeed one hell of a read. They don't mention it but the hypersalinity effect reminded me instantly of what happened to Lot's wife.
51: yeah, I'm really sorry. No clue what to suggest. This whole thing sucks so bad.
Norway just announced that as of Monday, most measures are being curtailed - contact tracing (which has been extensive) is essentially ending, quarantine obligations removed unless it is a family member and you are not vaccinated. If you get covid, you should tell your contacts yourself. (Masks have never been a big thing here and schools have run normally since late April '20)
The pandemic has generally been well-managed here so I guess it's ok, but with most of my contacts in North America and continental Europe, this feels abrupt. Finland announced a few weeks ago that if you are vaccinated, there is no reason to get tested unless you have high-risk contacts (immunosuppressed etc).
61: what about kids? Are they just gonna let it rip?
I guess. I haven't looked at the literature.
64: There was a period where people were worried about COVID in bathrooms on airplanes, because that's where they traced infections to. My guess is people took their mask off in the bathrooms and the aerosols were floating in the air still and they breathed them in.
The consensus now seems to be that transmission of COVID through what is charmingly called the faecal plume is very unlikely.
Still, anyone who has to poop on the airplane probably should have eaten cheese instead of fruit that morning.
They call it a lavatory because it's really for peeing plus the occasional cocaine use.
Don't forget sexual intercourse.
Don't have sex in the cocaine room.
Hmm. Health warning on the Nature article NW posted - the dig is being conducted by a couple of creationist "universities" neither of which are accredited. The paper itself, though, seems to have authors at minor but non-crazy institutions. And Nature is probably less easy to dupe than yer man at the Lancet.
I've seen creationists dig holes. They do it just fine.
I became a Level 50 Pokemon trainer yesterday and now my life is purposeless.
71: Ah, that's too bad. This paper reminded me of my own Catholic upbringing -- where the nuns would explain how science and the Bible were compatible. For instance, maybe an earthquake caused the Red Sea to part, and the Star of Bethlehem could be explained as a comet, and it looked as though archaeologists had finally found Noah's Ark.
My heuristic on this sort of thing is that there are plenty of dumbass academics in legit academic institutions, and that no reasonable academic is going to participate in academic work with a bullshit Christian University. My other heuristic is that any institution with a name like "Veritas International University" is necessarily going to be engaged in fraud.
What did you do when Level 40 was the max? You could try that again.
They need to release Civ 7 already.
I don't have a computer that will run civ 6 even.
I should have been made more suspicious by the fact that the paper also purports to explain the destruction of Jericho.
And it isn't published in Nature. It is in Nature Scientific Reports, "an open access peer reviewed journal" which according to Derek Lowe has published absolute crap in the past.
NSR has a an article-processing charge of $1500 to support their open access model. BioRxiv, also full of crap and useful early results, as well as unpaywalled versions of papers, not so.
Grants have funding to pay for journal page fees.
"manually constructed EDS-based phase map indicates center is pure SiO2 surrounded by melted mudbrick. "
Manually written comment suggests that choosing to collaborate on this thing was a bad idea. Corresponding author's institution is "Comet Research Institute"
This is very distracting. Is any research on this subject accurate? Where does the bullshit begin? For example, the authors of the report in 54 cite an Oxford UP publication from 1995 concerning the geology of the Dead Sea. I'm not dazzled by university presses by any means and am totally willing to believe that particular book is flawed, but I don't read a lot of the creationism-debunking literature* that's been circulating (mostly online) for the past few decades, so I don't know if it's more a matter of people nudging the probability needles systematically in one direction while giving explanations for mostly valid geological/archaeological data, or if there are also big holes in the data. That is, I don't know where the divergence from scientific consensus actually occurs. The variety of author affiliations on that asteroid report is fairly amazing.
Nature Scientific Reports, "an open access peer reviewed journal" which according to Derek Lowe...
Here and here, if anyone else is curious.
* although I did read the review that prompted this exchange.
Where does the bullshit begin?
At the colon of a bull.
Okay, but if you lay all the bulls in the Bible end to end...
84. Dembski is so 20th century!
I agree that it could be a fake, or "inspired reasoning." The most daunting thing about verifying or debunking it is that it has a gigantic bibliography. Most academics will just sniff and ignore it as not worth their time.
Addressing the Sodom/Jericho paper itself, I read a big chunk (holding my nose at the sources -- NSR and the Christian Fundie Universities). I'd say (about 40% starting from the beginner), including randomly picked sections further in, then skimmed the rest for plausibility, and read the conclusions in toto. Yes, it look a long time. It is not obviously bullshit.
Most importantly, it looks quite falsifiable. Some geologist/geophysicist could pretty easily knock it down if it's wrong on the data, although some claims would have to be confirmed in situ (for example, the stuff about the salt content of the soil, which they cleverly downplay through most of the piece). Archeologists could weigh in on the claim that the area of the event remained unoccupied for hundreds of years. The event itself is plausible. Etc. It may well be that the thing is a fake but if so it's a very detailed and well-done one. I wouldn't believe it unless there was a lot more confirmation from less invested academics, though.
I actually enjoyed reading it. (To be fair, I've been sick the last week [not Covid] and don't have a lot else to do.)
IMO subjects where there's a lot of popular interest in the outcome have low average publication quality.
For biblical archeology, there's also not much source material, and sources are controlled by nutjobs. Bronze-age history is pretty interesting, I like Amanda Podany's work, both her Very Short Introduction volume and an online lecture series she did.
The scammy Cornell Food science guy chose a field where the least publishable unit was tiny and also prone to generating exaggerated headlines, and that wasn't enough, he added fraud. The quality of a lot of research on human genetics applied to personality traits is terrible, probably there are good papers somewhere but I basically won't read that stuff because so much junk
Not to beat a dead horse, but the Tunguska event covered roughly 10^(-5) of earth's land surface. We've had some number of centuries' worth of records for a good fraction of land area, sufficient detail to enumerate past large earthquakes, comet sightings, volcanoes. A past event not common in the record affecting one of the very few built settlements in existence at the time-- not impossible, but a priori skepticism level is high, and what's here is feeble.
As is common in Biblical archaeology, the motivations of the participants are often questionable but that doesn't necessarily have a huge impact on the results. I haven't read through this paper in detail, but it appears to be primarily technical earth science analysis of material from the site, and most of the authors are earth scientists of various sorts from completely legitimate institutions. The only name I recognized immediately was James P. Kennett, a respected geoarchaeologist at UC Santa Barbara who often participates in multidisciplinary studies. "Veritas International University" and "Trinity Southwest University" definitely sound suspicious, and despite growing up in Albuquerque I had never heard of the latter until now, but overall I wouldn't dismiss the paper out of hand. I would definitely like to see the technical analyses reviewed by a set of independent technical experts, though.
1. Flying to Jammies' brother's wedding tomorrow morning - posting may be delayed.
2. my mom is not exactly suicidal, but also not exactly wanting to keep living. She is still in the hospital due to unresolved symptoms and saying things like, "I'm not ever going to leave the hospital " and "I am done trying to get this fixed" and other things in that ilk. It's deeply unsettling.
To be clear, the lingering symptoms are not fatal, so I don't think she's at risk of slipping away imminently?
I'm sorry for both of you. I've heard that any time you get your bowels operated on, it takes a long time to settle back into place. Maybe it will resolve with a bit more time.
91.2: I'm sorry. That's awful and so distressing. Might be anesthesia related, maybe, I'm hoping?
88 is me too. The only bit of the paper itself that looked off to me was the bit where they say "we have 17 lines of evidence and only an impact explains all 17". Because that isn't the way it works; maybe they could all be explained by a combination of two or three other causes, like massacre plus fire plus nearby volcanism or something. What you want is "this particular bit of evidence cannot be explained in any other way than an impact". Also instead of similarities with Tunguska, I'd want to see more about differences from other sites which were definitely destroyed by other means. Maybe you find tiny diamonds all over the ground at Knossos or Hissarlik too!
"We've had some number of centuries' worth of records for a good fraction of land area"
Probably less than one would think. I doubt there would be any reports or records of the Tunguska explosion if it had happened just a century earlier, for example. It didn't leave a crater, for one thing.
The whole thing is immensely annoying - if only one could trust devout Christians to be at least as honest as the average man! But you can't, the bastards will lie as easy as breathing if they see an advantage in it.
Bronze-age history is pretty interesting, I like Amanda Podany's work, both her Very Short Introduction volume and an online lecture series she did.
I read that book a few years ago, and just now found out she was an original band member of the Bangles before they were the Bangles, quit in 1981 to go to grad school, but then did a reunion show 25 years later. Very cool!
I think that the extremely high temperatures recorded or revealed by the damage are very hard to explain any other way: also, the absence of any debris from fighting
And there are some bits of biblical archaeology you can trust: it's fairly well established, for instance, that Solomon's kingdom was nothing like as grand as the Bible suggests if indeed it ever existed except as a sort of King Arthur-style retcon job in exile. Also I suspect that there is no archaeological evidence of an invasion and genocide by the children of Israel when they finally got out of Sinai.
I suspect that there is no archaeological evidence of an invasion and genocide by the children of Israel when they finally got out of Sinai.
Indeed, there's no archaeological evidence of an exodus at all, or of the historical reality of any part of the biblical narrative earlier than David. And even the evidence for David is very tenuous and controversial. The first book for which there is specific independent corroboration of anything is 2 Kings.
We have their Hello Fresh orders.
Perhaps more exciting archeology news: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/23/science/ancient-footprints-ice-age.html?smid=tw-share
It looks like my mom might be discharged this weekend!
And: my eldest brother is flying home for three days to help them get settled while home health worker stuff gets arranged. And my middle brother is flying home for 10 days in October. This is really unbelievable that both of them have stepped up sooner and more emphatically than I have. I can't ever remember something remotely like this, and it's making me feel really good and happy.
My brother interfered endlessly with my father's care. The day before my father died, for one example, my brother went to the hospice with a lawyer to get my father's medical power of attorney reassigned. My father refused to sign.
I found out about this when the lawyer billed the estate.
103: The New York Times story doesn't mention it, but archeological research shows that in the places where there are no footprints, that's where Jesus was carrying them.
I would have but I know there was supposed to be one set of footprints.
Hey hey hey, how about some spoiler alerts here people? I was only halfway through the poster.
If you'd read even the first half, you'd know it's one versus two sets of footprints.
Indeed, there's no archaeological evidence of an exodus at all,
This inspired me to look up the Wikipedia article. Reading the summary of the biblical narrative, I was surprised at how intense and super-ahistorical was my reaction: "holy shit, the Israelites are in such a classic abusive relationship with God!" You belong to me! I will be so good to you, just be faithful! Oh, you did what? Why did you make me hurt you like that?
Huh. Maybe you should tell somebody Jewish in case they never noticed?
Ha, ha. It just made me wonder how Kids These Days process the story, when they hear about it in Hebrew school or Sunday school or online or wherever, because it's just so *weird* from a contemporary perspective (especially when turned into a Wikipedia summary). I mean, it was obviously also very not modern 30 years ago when I was a kid, or 15 years ago when I was a teaching assistant in a political theory class that covered some Old Testament, but I feel like Exodus' Yahweh is even more out of sync with the woke, cancel-culture, TikTok age than that guy who got called a bedbug.
The God of Exodus looks pretty bad by modern woke standards, it's true, but the God of Deuteronomy is even worse. Same abusive dynamics with more genocide.
There's no sense denying that the dynamic leads to really first class comedy writing. I don't know if you've ever looked at what passed for entertainment in America before we invented letting Jewish people in while still being assholes about it, but it's mostly rubbish.
Last week at my current job. I can't wait till it's finally over.
AIMHMHB , Evelyn Waugh:
"In the hope of keeping him quiet for a few hours Freddy & I have bet Randolph [Churchill, son of Winston] 20 pounds that he cannot read the whole Bible in a fortnight. It would have been worth it at the price. Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud 'I say, I bet you didn't know this came in the Bible "bring down my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave"' or merely slapping his side & chortling 'God, isn't God a shit!'"
I always like the awesome men of God.
"A man of God came to me. He looked like an angel of God, very awesome. I didn't ask him where he came from, and he didn't tell me his name. But he said to me, `You will conceive and give birth to a son ...'"
- Samson's mommy.
Don't angels look like burning wheels and shit?
There's a whole menagerie of different types of angels, all different looking. But few if any of them look like the characters in classical European art.
116 I'm sure I mentioned this before, but I watched the Ridley Scott exodus movie, and the depiction of God as a pissed off pre-teen was quite something.
That alone proves the critics who thought there wasn't anything 'original' in the film completely wrong.
For the small phone enthusiasts, my elderly phone just met with an accident. When I went to buy the replacement today, the salesfolk told me that Apple just released the iPhone Mini. The width is the same as my old iPhone 6, and it's a bit shorter. It's still a tiny bit too large, but I figured I'd mention it here.
The mini is great, but this is the last generation it will exist and then there will be no more small phones ever again. The only remaining hope, which is slim, is that maybe they'll use the mini shell for future generations of SE. But most likely this is literally the last small phone.
It's really hard to throw a curveball on an iPhone SE.
And I think it's safe to say that mostly what people want in a phone is to play Pokemon Go.
126: Boo. I'd figured I'd be getting the SE because the Mini didn't exist the last time we had a household phone replacement, but was tickled with this option. Given that the last phone lasted a good long while, I'm going to just hope this one has a similar life expectancy.
129: Yeah, a big part of the problem is that the SE came out at just the right time to cannibalize the sales of the mini. But it also just seems like people who want small phones is a pretty small market.
122: some angels look human, eg the ones in the story of Lot which are mistaken for humans.
127: About a month ago, I upgraded from a dying iPhone 8 to a 12, and the new screen dimensions made hitting excellent throws MASSIVELY easier. Like night and day. It's like I'd been playing this whole time with a governor under the gas pedal.
125: Yes, when they released the first mini (iPhone 12 mini) last year, it seemed to FINALLY be exactly what I wanted: a flagship all-screen iPhone, but small. The reports of mediocre battery life, plus rumors of this year's being the very last, plus my SE stubbornly refusing to die, kept me from buying one. Now that the iPhone 13 mini is out, with better battery and cameras, I think I'll finally give in (especially because the rumors about it being the last small one have only solidified). At least when we have money again. Flagship phones are very expensive without contract subsidies, especially in Europe!