@CowperKettle I wonder why the Roland company chose that name..... is that after the Song of Roland?

@DannyuNDos Your countryman Cho Seong-Jin is a very mature pianist (see his Deutsche Grammophon playlist); he's among my favorites to listen for his interpretation as well as his good body language and fingering techniques. South Korea in recent years has produced several world-class pianists. You must be proud :-).

@Robusto My problem wasn't that he included the definition; it was that he could have just not used that word at all and explained the problem without the terminology.

OK, a slight blemish on an otherwise fine article.

The whole column has a lot of fluff and flourishes--not the aesthetically pleasing kind, the unnecessary and annoying kind.

Thursday's.

Got it in the last try.

I had no idea what the 4th blue one was. I didn't know Americans thought that that was what the word meant.

The above, on reasons for closure, is quoted from KillingTime on meta.

Not an explanation I’ve ever heard before.

But then, I usually avoid the meta discussions.

@alphabet OK, so Merry Fucking Christmas.

I wanted to write "you are widely seen as part of the problem," but I'm far too friendly a raccoon to be that explicit.

@alphabet I concur.

You know me, just radiating kindness and universal love for the humans.

Just like the Grinch.

I should try to be less disputatious.

We haven't discussed Real Cheese Theory in chat in a while.

Equador. I wonder if the Earth's centrifugal force at the equator has a role to play here. worlddata.info/average-penissize.php

As every cat owner knows, cats have no owners

@CowperKettle Did you mean Ecuador?

@Robusto Both are ecuatable

@jlliagre QQ

Ok, je sors.

@tchrist Make me moderator in next election. I'll fix that in 24 hours!

Stalin's last bodyguard has died in Yekaterinburg, aged 100. e1.ru/text/gorod/2024/12/12/74869733

He was the last bodyguard who'd been alive yet.

I have bursts of uncomfortable 'agitation' in my head which make it hard to think and make me afraid of seeking a job where I would engage with people more. Could my elevated urinary free cortisol (2X the normal range) have something to do with that?

I know not what hardware Windows 12 will run on, but Windows 13 will run on sticks and stones

@CowperKettle Might not duty and distraction by obligations suppress or lift the agitation?

@Cerberus Distraction may suppress it. I'll take some additional cortisol test.. maybe I should buy a package of mifepristone and try it out on my own

People with Cushing syndrome have reduced brain size and grey matter. I have it, although it's "stage 1" and could be just a variation of the norm, according to the radiologist

Elevated cortisol may increase blood sugar, and I was falsely diagnosed with diabetes exactly when these bouts of agitation started, in 2000. Maybe that sugar spike was caused by high cortisol back then.

The radiologist's impression this spring says "hydrocephalus ex vacuo" in such and such regions of the brain, meaning there's less grey matter and more fluid between the brain and the skull than in a typical person

Stress?

Yes, I might be extra-sensitive to stress

When I had anxiety long ago, it was triggered by stress, then became a kind of vicious circle.

So, if you have a job, won't it make you focus on the job and take away from agitation?

@MetaEd That doesn't look healthy, have you had yourself checked out, of late?

@Cerberus ?

You can't just get 0 letters right, then 1 but at the wrong place, then suddenly get the entire word.

That's not normal.

the first two moves ruled out all but three words, and I was lucky enough to guess right

Yeah, rationalise it.

I call witchcraft or alien implant.

I get that a lot

No doubt.

See??

That had better have been an X.

but then I have days like

So are you a witch or a devil, I can't tell any more.

I didn't even know you had six attempts.

@CowperKettle Google search points to this Nature journal article although paywall made me unable to verify whether the table is indeed from that article (since Google must have been provided with more indexable data). Does increasing blue/red intensity means increasing negative/positive correlation? I wonder what the 3 dots means.

My body feels warmer after dinner (a few hours before sleeping). Especially hands, which are colder during the day and before dinner. If it's because of eating, it should happen after breakfast/lunch too.

Answering my own question, "OR" is odds ratio and PGS is genetic predisposition for a neuropsychiatric trait. So for "computers and math" profession, it means that ADHD people are less likely to join but on the other hand ASD people are more likely to join. But a common hobby for them (under "Arts & design") has contradictory likelihood for "Depression", though increasing ASD seems consistent with the data.

Maybe (as the Abstract says), the correlation is at best "statistically significant but weak", so within margin of error. Still, I know 2 doctors and 1 dentist who seem to have ADHD trait.

Only pictures this time, no spelled-out words.

@Robusto Yes, first time I see it. Wonder whether this is a one-off or continuing.

I suspect it'll surface now and then.

@GratefulDisciple Yes, the legend for the correlation value is on the right in the graphic: redder means more positively correlated (for a max of 1) and bluer is negatively correlated (max magnitude -1). And the dots are for statistical significance, 1 dot is usually %5, two dots %1 and 3 dots %0.1(But that isn't specified in the picture).

@Cerberus it's your choice

The choice of red positive and blue negative is weird to me, but as long as it is specified, it's OK.

@Mitch really should be red positive, black negative, and green earth

@Mitch Thanks. Maybe that legend is outside the picture crop. I just also noticed that it's a star, not a dot.

I think you'll also notice in the graphic these 'trees' along the axes. That shows a clustering of likely things together (by the correlations) and it gives a nice ordering so that things in the same subtree are closer together in order. eg the professions from cleaning to transportation for a cluster of similarity.

@MetaEd What, are you Jamaican?

@Mitch Jamaican me nervous

@GratefulDisciple statistical significance values are usually given in a caption (or are well known enough by academicians to be omitted)

@MetaEd Djibouti? I barely know him.

@GratefulDisciple Yes. Stars are the usual designation for levels of statistical significance.

@GratefulDisciple Yes, it's all just correlations, and one should bear in mind that these conditions are hazy and hard to 'diagnose' with any certainty

> The survey was previously administered in 2017, when 19% of U.S. adults ranked at the lowest levels of literacy. In 2023, that figure increased to 28%, a change that NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr called “substantial” nbcnews.com/data-graphics/…

I wonder if this is a moral panic or indeed so many people read poorly.

@CowperKettle Such is the vicissitudes of researchers; you never know whether after painstaking data collection and statistical analysis your gamble thesis would give you a jackpot correlation or not. In this case, they tried and didn't find enough positive correlation, but good for the research community nonetheless.

@CowperKettle Also it's a -meta- study which means they're taking lots of articles (as many they can get their hands on (studying each of the pairs of disorder to profession (not necessarily one article per pair)) and pulling out the stats (correlations and significance values) and combining all these stats together.

so there's a bit of extra fuzziness with the combination.

(but also presumably if more than one study is done on an individual square, you get -less- fuzziness when you average).

@GratefulDisciple Eiko Fried, a German researcher, tries to perfect the diagnosis of depression, and there's a good blog post by him showing that currently 'depression' is something extremely poorly defined. The chances of 2 psychiatrists agreeing that the same patient has 'depression' are slightly above the chances obtained by a coin toss

@CowperKettle What it tells me is that they are still working toward a better diagnostic tool, which also warns me that unless the psychiatrist / counselor has known me sufficiently I would be wary to take pills. CBT and diaries seem to be the safest, which "normal" people should be doing anyway to improve one's psychological health.

@GratefulDisciple part of the 'replication' crisis in many experimental sciences (psychology, medicine) over the past 15 years has been the realization that if you're trying real hard to do your experiment well, then you should publish all the results, whether they are ground breaking high correlations or boring little correlation at all (eg stomach ulcers and h. pylori infections, or sex and IQ differences, respectively).

So, writes he, how could we even start searching for biomarkers of 'depression', if professional psychiatrists diverge in their assessments of the same person within 48 hours.

@CowperKettle Thanks for the reference; will keep him in mind. But yes, that's why we need 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th opinion in mental evaluation if in major diagnosis (for bodily ailment) it's a best practice to seek 2nd opinion.

@CowperKettle I don't think depression is totally a random thing as this seems to suggest.

@Mitch By "replication crisis" do you mean the failure to repeat a study with the exact same condition? At any rate, isn't a research's most important rule is that you have to specify all relevant conditions and circumstances of EVERY step / parameter of your research so others can replicate?

that probably explains why I've been unable to recreate the heavens and the earth

@Mitch I think there are different 'depressions'. Scientists should first break up 'depression' into some robustly discernible groups of 'depression', and follow from there

In my 'depression', I've been sleeping for 12 hours or more a day. Other people with 'depression' cannot fall asleep.

@CowperKettle I completely agree; there should be distinct criteria for neurological, brain chemistry, blood chemistry, psychological, societal, or even spiritual categories.

@GratefulDisciple Yes, and yes. That's why it was a crisis when it came out that a lot of past experiments, as described in publications, did not in fact get similar results.

@Mitch I see. Making it worse for meta analysis: "garbage in", "garbage out"?

@MetaEd You really have to know the trick to get it just right. You can't just wave your hands and speak confidently.

@GratefulDisciple one of the primary goals of meta-analysis attempts to mitigate experiment variation. You're doing stats on a lot of stats already done (and attempting to match up similar experimental designs as much as possible)

@Mitch it's not a magician's trick, it's simple quantum mechanics

@Mitch That's understandable. Creating a good experiment is very expensive. You want to find an unexplored niche.

@GratefulDisciple I found one but there was a creeper in it

@MetaEd Simple? I intentionally made God intentionally made those quantum laws probabilistic specifically to make the interactions more interesting. Simple? I take God should take that as an insult.

@CowperKettle BTW, this list of depression assessment instruments suggests the gamut of how a professional diagnose depression.

@MetaEd :-)

Gotta do some work, have a good day everyone!

@GratefulDisciple There's also the difficulty that now that science is considered an official public good and supported by governments, the incentives for gaining knowledge have skewed towards fundable ('exciting') results away from, for lack of a better term than I can think of at the moment, truth.

@Mitch Yes, agreed. Government does have a place for very expensive basic research such as creating those tunnels to smash atoms together, etc. Or spearhead space exploration which by now rightfully taken over by private enterprises.

ie publish as much as possible with exciting new results rather than the correlated but not identical correct results.

@GratefulDisciple I'm scared to look at that list. Are any forged steel implements involved?

In 2018, I was given some long questionnaires and the psychiatrists said I did not look like a depressive person, and I came short one point on the depression scale, so unqualified for a diagnosis. But when I asked for a written official description of me, to give to the state psychiatric clinic, they wrote a boilerplate-type description of a depressive person. Garbage in - garbage out. They share faulty information.

@Mitch you train your quantum mechanics your way, I'll train mine my way

@GratefulDisciple Good day!

@GratefulDisciple Or creating mRNA vaccines.

@Mitch I don't think so. This is not dental (BTW I survived my last cleaning).

I love the space exploration/atom smashing stuff as much as the next nerd, but if had to have only one or the other, I'd prefer the medicine stuff.

@Mitch Sure. It's disheartening to see those conspiracy theorists spreading fear about mRNA vaccines.

@GratefulDisciple Conspiracy theorists are people with too much time on their hands and little scientific education (or if they do have the education, they're benefitting personally somehow from publicizing the conspiracy).

> When slow-wave sleep is artificially augmented from outside, memory improves. But what we didn't know until now was what exactly is happening inside the brain when this occurs medicalxpress.com/news/2024-12-brain-neocortex-deep-memory.html

@GratefulDisciple A funny thing about PHQ-9 (way down on that page). It was designed intially not by academicians, but by a pharmaceutical company to measure the strength of the response of one of their depression medications because (I think this is how the story goes) they didn't have an easy one available at the time (early 1990's?).

I'm not saying they created the questionnaire to intentionally encourage the sale of their medication. I mean they could have, but I have no evidence of that.

Pharmaceutical companies make a boatload of money though.

Or at least I heard that's how PHQ-9 (and GAD-7) were created.

I was suspended from Israel’s Knesset for highlighting the tyranny of Netanyahu. Help us to oppose him

> In the Orwellian dystopia of the Israeli parliament, those who celebrate war crimes are considered heroes, while those who fight for justice are persecuted as traitors. My punishment is a continuation of the political persecution of opponents of the dirty war and critics of Netanyahu’s bloody rule.

> Under the guise of combating terrorism, legislation to shrink the democratic sphere is being passed at an accelerated speed. Teachers, academics, students, journalists, workers are all targeted, censored and silenced. A special bill to bar parties whose main constituency is Arab citizens of Israel from participating in national elections is currently being formulated.

> Scientists have accidentally discovered a particle that has mass when it’s traveling in one direction, but no mass while traveling in a different direction. Known as semi-Dirac fermions, particles with this bizarre behavior were first predicted 16 years ago.

is it wrong that my first thought is, how can I fit semi-Dirac into a dad joke

Semi-Dirac? I'm standing right in front of him!

> Latin surdus (“silent”), from Proto-Indo-European *swer- (“ringing, whistling”).

One can produce recoilless hammers using semi-Dirac fermions

Word of the eve: a mute, in Russian: surdina, from French

@Xanne tell co-pilot to get in touch with Data for funny lessons

@CowperKettle In Italian it's sordino ... you see con sordino direction in music a lot.

@Robusto And in Sardinian?

Too busy eating sardines to worry about music.

@Robusto Je vais la mettre en sourdine alors.

@jlliagre Je vais me taire aussi alors.

Oh, already posted.