English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

2:39 PM

Sure, the James Webb telescope is cool and all. But try making one out of Lego.

3:21 PM

Stalinism is what you get when street smart thugs become politicians.

Trust nobody, not even yourself.

Thanks for sharing @CowperKettle

Is he triple vaxed?

Google says "yes," but who really knows...

5:45 PM

@CowperKettle That's no excuse. He's younger than I am, and my mental health is just fine. My only problem is anxiety brought on by people like Putin and Trump.

5:56 PM

@CowperKettle I forget who referred to "the thin veneer of civilization," but that is certainly evident in your country. And very nearly in mine.

7:16 PM

Seems like several people have used that idea.

> Katherine Kelaidis, resident scholar at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago, said, "The Greeks very much had this sense … that civilization is a very thin veneer and that under even slight amounts of pressure, that social contract starts to break down, and [when] people lose that veneer … that can be very dangerous."

And from Bill Moyers:

> “Civilization is but a thin veneer stretched across the passions of the human heart. And civilization doesn't just happen; we have to make it happen.”

7:44 PM

@Robusto meanwhile, our veneer is pretty thick

smugly vaguely points in the direction of Persepolis

@CowperKettle Ooh reminds me, I recently did get around to watching The(?) Death of Stalin. It was hilarious, then dark, and overall a much much better film than I expected!

2

Oh, and a bit of the newer Jobs movie, the one without Fassbender, which was on TV. It was horrible. Constantly having the Jobs actor do the whimsical genius stereotype eye glint. Guy was doing yoga on a wheat field to come up with inspiration for Apple . . . I mean, I hadn't met the real Jobs either but I wasn't the one making a movie about him

@M.A.R. Jobs was more shark than genius. He stole from anyone and everyone.

@Robusto I haven't watched the one with Fassbender, just the few scenes in the beginning, and the movie was clearly not going to glorify Jobs, and I felt that was right for someone that cuts back humanitarian aid from a billion dollar corporation

The more recent one just gave me a headache. Not even the good sort of bad.

He stole the idea for the computer mouse from Xerox PARC.

Was never a history buff but that sounds on point

PARC (company)

PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, Xerox Corporation's chief scientist, the company was originally a division of Xerox, tasked with creating computer technology-related products and hardware systems.Xerox PARC has been at the heart of numerous revolutionary computer developments as laser printing, Ethernet, the modern personal computer, graphical user interface (GUI) and desktop paradigm, object-oriented programming, ubiquitous computing, electronic paper, amorphous silicon...

Read about their GUI.

7:59 PM

Anyhow, the exams are over! And I can get around to readng some Discworld finally

> Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft later stated that the Xerox graphical interface influenced both Microsoft and Apple, and Steve Jobs of Apple said that “Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry, could have been the IBM of the nineties, could have been the Microsoft of the nineties."[12][13]

@M.A.R. Congrats! How do you think you did?

My own opinion, okayish. Of course everyone keeps saying I'm a geek or a genius and I don't see it

Stuff is hard

It has to be hard before it becomes easy.

Oh I do like the challenge, I just wish medical and pharmaceutical textbooks weren't so hard to plow through

At best I read 7 or 8 pages an hour. While I can do almost triple that while reading a novel

@M.A.R. Science texts tend to be very dense, and not engagingly written.

8:03 PM

@CowperKettle well, considering the maker of the movie already did a parody of American politics before making the movie

Frankly, it was a source of concern for me too. These movies are hardly ever what you can call unbiased.

But it wasn't that, at all, to my pleasant surprise. It was just history, from a cynical but balanced point of view

If a non-Iranian movie so much as mentions Iranians, everyone here loses their shit. You haven't seen the half of it

@CowperKettle I feel like you folks had more interesting childhoods than me. I think the onky relevant thing I had was an Atari

I remember a test I had in AP Calculus in high school, where there was a problem like this: "A man-of-war is chasing a pirate ship around a point. [Then it gives the location of the ships and the point and their courses and speeds, and the currents.] Will the pirate ship be able to clear the point and get free? Explain." I prefaced my answer with "To hell with the explanation, get on with the story!"

Ooh, calaculus. My favorte subject to pretend like I have a plan for studying

Heh.

Yup, that was it.

I took AP Calculus, AP Physics, and AP English as a senior in high school. It was a busy year.

@CowperKettle Brings me back . . . Our first computer ran on XP with 512 MB RAM

Show off

As recently as the '90s RAM was measured in megs.

I remember when 64 megs of RAM was ginormous.

8:11 PM

Here I worry that half the computer stores would infect my hardware with a fatal disease

I build my own PCs these days. You get better quality for less money.

@CowperKettle they're not known for an overabundance of CS education

@M.A.R. I had pong

@CowperKettle here everyone uses pirated software

@Robusto I had a Sinclair programmable calculator that had a memory, combined instructions and data registers of (checks notes) 30 bytes

8:15 PM

Speaking of the thin veneer of civilization: 40-person brawl breaks out in restaurant after news of steak shortage.

@Robusto I remember when it was in bytes. Not kilobytes, but bytes

also we had to use a bicycle to run a generator.

@CowperKettle but everyone knows only homosexual computers got the virus

and run just to keep in place

good times

@Mitch You had a bike for that? We had hamsters.

@Robusto haha you're lucky you had hamsters

that were alive

we had to boil our hamsters to get any energy out of them

8:18 PM

A bike is easier, you just pull the string and it goes for a while

@Mitch We had to make our own hamsters.

@Mitch where did you get the energy to boil them?

@CowperKettle What is this world coming to?

It's like dignity has suddenly been priced out of the market.

@M.A.R. To be fair, such side mentions of Iran are often horribly antagonistic. So it is reasonable to be upset by them.

By the way, it's the 12th of Bahman. Khomeini arrived in Tehran at this date some half century ago.

8:20 PM

@CowperKettle Often much younger than that.

@M.A.R. duh... by burning the old boiled hamsters.

@M.A.R. What is that in metric?

So now the state TV can take some break from propagada shows and show propaganda

And there's this documentary on

And it's talking about protests in America when Shah paid a visit in, say, 1975

And they somehow twist that into something xenophobic

They're both villifying Shah and the people that protested against him

These people never cease to amaze me

I think we should tag much of this discussion as thin-veneer-of-civilization

@M.A.R. Oh I see what you mean. Yeah we were always too tired to even bother given that we had to choose between eating the boiled hamsters and using them for fuel. We would just lie down and go to wake up an hour before we had to go to sleep up

@M.A.R. Woohoo! Partay!

8:23 PM

@Robusto somewhere in 1978 shrug

@Mitch I sleep down. How do you sleep up?

Converting from Shamsi to Gregorian is pretty odd, haven't figured it out

@M.A.R. I saw (or was it heard) a recent show on how the spread of Khomeini's anti-Shah lectures were almost entirely due to some hackers at the time figuring out how to encrypt and copy tapes for distribution in Iran.

These documentaries are really amazing. They can talk about this evil US president, and, say, show Obama walk into the room, and it casts such an evil air about him. And you know this feeling has some deep xenophobic roots, but I can't really pinpoint what it exactly does.

or something involving those words

8:26 PM

They show a documentary of how the moon landing was fake, then show Nixon or Ford or someone else, just uttering a couple of innocuous words

@CowperKettle This is now the time for me to re-propose my long standing solution to the crisis: ASK RUSSIA TO JOIN NATO

It immediately makes them out to be eeevil

It's all about envy

everybody wants to belong

If Russia were part of NATO, then that would greatly reduce the threat of war among the European/NA powers.

Then...

@CowperKettle he was a petty asshole, but way less of a jerk than the people had seen in two centuries maybe.

8:28 PM

that's when the -real- colonialism starts.

the rest of the world would be screwed.

@CowperKettle not thick enough veneer

@CowperKettle I don't think that's how capitalism works

on second thought... maybe it does?

@M.A.R. To be fair, I haven't seen -anybody- in two centuries

so maybe they've forgotten what it was like

@Mitch our people had hindsight

Literally

We're like owls

@CowperKettle I would say that's smart, but then, look at the results.

@CowperKettle well it just makes me full of joy that we've had such good teachers to thank for the recent bout of nonstop propaganda that swept over every sort of Farsi media

8:32 PM

I think the veneer is pretty thick

@CowperKettle Faking a moon landing would be way harder than just going to the fucking moon.

@Mitch no one said it's going to be a contest

@Mitch The glass is half full?

@CowperKettle Well, conspiracy theorists have always been around, but they're coming out in droves lately.

@CowperKettle The Soviets had the edge in rocketry for some time, mainly because they got most of the Nazi rocket scientists and most of the V2 rockets and factories.

Yes, but he also stood on the shoulders of giants, as every genius does.

@CowperKettle People of intellect, capable of independent thought, were viewed as dangerous by the Party, I presume.

@Robusto well, putting it like that always depresses me, so I think the distinction between the nutjobs leading the circus and the curious observers that listen to these drunkards and merely relay their theories to others in small talk is useful

@M.A.R. There is a third distinction: those who promote and profit from the misinformation, even knowing it to be false.

8:43 PM

A subset of the circus leaders I presume

Still pretty few in number, and they've always been many if you knew where to look for them

Snake oil remedies and homeopathy and historically, new sects and what-not

@CowperKettle Yeah, I remember reading about him. And how he died for bucking Stalin's ignorance on genetics.

@CowperKettle It's been a science since Gregor Mendel. Ignorant people have ignored that, though, sometimes dangerously.

A thug rules with fear.

cya

Ruhollah Khomeini's return to Iran

9:08 PM

@Robusto Mendel faked the data in his pea experiments.

Just to add a bit of irrationalism to the story.

@Robusto The glass is the wrong size for what's poured into it.

@M.A.R. Just for the 50th anniversary? Any good youtube ones?

Ruhollah Khomeini, known in the Western world as Ayatollah Khomeini, was an Iranian Shia Muslim religious leader, philosopher, revolutionary and politician. He was the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution that saw the overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. Following the revolution, Khomeini became the country's Supreme Leader, a position created in the constitution of the Islamic Republic as the highest-ranking political and religious authority of the nation, which he held until his death. On 1 February 1979...

right there at the end

Wasn't that around the year of the hostage taking?

The West had pretty high hopes about that. Most of their concerns were about the communists, they thought Khomeini would balance things out.

@user726941 I think that might have happened a year later?

The hostages were released on inauguration day of Reagan in 1982 and I remember the hostages being in for ~400 days so that started fall 1980?

Timeline of the Iranian hostage crisis

Nov 4, 79

This is a timeline of the Iran hostage crisis (1979–1981), starting from the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's leaving of Iran and return of all hostages to the United States. == 1979 == 16 January: Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi leaves Iran for exile to Egypt. 1 February: Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Iran from France after fifteen years of exile 22 October: Shah Pahlavi arrives in the United States for cancer treatment. 4 November: Aggressive planned demonstrations take place near the Embassy of the United States. About 500 demonstrators climb over the embassy's fence as Iranian police look on. Embassy...

9:28 PM

@Mitch So as a scientist he was ahead of his time.

@user726941 argh...all my computations and numbers were correct... except the time of Reagan's inauguration.

> Daniel L. Hartl and Daniel J. Fairbanks reject outright Fisher's statistical argument, suggesting that Fisher incorrectly interpreted Mendel's experiments. They find it likely that Mendel scored more than 10 progeny, and that the results matched the expectation. They conclude: "Fisher's allegation of deliberate falsification can finally be put to rest, because on closer analysis it has proved to be unsupported by convincing evidence."[

@Robusto haha. very cycnical. I can one-up you in cynicism and speculate that data fabrication was probably even more common back then than now.

@Robusto interesting. link?

yeah, data science has come a long way

Veneer theory

Veneer theory is a term coined by Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal to label the Hobbesian view of human morality that he criticizes throughout his work. Although he criticizes this view in earlier works, the term in this form is introduced in his 2005 book "Our Inner Ape", denoting a concept that he rejects, namely that human morality is "a cultural overlay, a thin veneer hiding an otherwise selfish and brutish nature". The idea of the veneer theory goes back to Thomas Henry Huxley and has more recently been advocated by biologists like George C. Williams. == Proponents of the theory == ...

9:32 PM

@Mitch Mendelian paradox.

But I also see Thucydides being mentioned. So the label 'Veneer theory' is de Waal's based on Huxley's 'thin veneer of civilization' based on Hobbes's ideas, which were possibly based on Thucydides ideas. So the phrasing is probably Huxley's.

In a lot of ways the pandemic has turned our "inner ape" into our "inner snake"

But de Waal was basically saying the idea doesn't really hold because chimps.

Well, that would be the fish & chimps paradox.

+1

5 Biggest Explosions to Ever Happen

9:36 PM

►

9:46 PM

> they concluded that there were no reasons to assert Mendel fabricated his results, nor that Fisher deliberately tried to diminish Mendel's legacy.[67] Reassessment of Fisher's statistical analysis, according to these authors, also disproves the notion of confirmation bias in Mendel's results.

@Mitch Yeah. Where there's an icon there'll always be an iconoclast, I suppose.

Which is yet another example of a 'fact' (scientists are always honest) being wrong, and then the fact showing it is wrong (Fisher showed Mendel faked it) is wrong then -that- is wrong (Fisher actually showed he -didn't- fake his data).

Yep. Like ripples traversing a pond and then being reflected back.

But Fisher and Pearson and Galton (the gods of statistics) were eugenicists.

> High school graduation rates dipped in at least 20 states after the first full school year disrupted by the pandemic, suggesting the coronavirus may have ended nearly two decades of nationwide progress toward getting more students diplomas, an analysis shows.

9:54 PM

What is the concept called that says the distribution of initial digits of large numbers in any system will favor the lower numbers? For example there are about 30% of large numbers that begin with 1 as opposed to any other digit?

I remember there was a name for that, but I can't remember it now.

Benford