Scare of the day: "If mirror bacteria ever started growing outside a lab, they could be very hard to stop. Our immune systems wouldn't detect them well. Natural predators would struggle to attack them. The risk to human and ecological health seems unprecedented."
> Last Christmas Ich gave thee myne hearte But the verye next daye ther came a wolf, Wyth sinews of whispers - quiet as frost - And the wolf stole my hearte, fled To a tower out of tyme biyonde all the stars. Seek now myne hearte, Return it within a yeare and a daye: Thys ys thy queste!
@think_meaning_buildß Next year will be a special year, only the third such in America's existence. Its previous such year was 88 years ago, and its first one was 175 years ago. What makes next year special in this way, and when will be the next such?
I googled "impact of lithium on cortisol levels" and found studies with contradictory findings. Some say it decreases, other say it increases cortisol.
@CowperKettle Li is pretty toxic. Leave it as a last resort.
And it has a very narrow TI, meaning it's easy to miss the therapeutic dose or cross the threshold into toxic doses. And it has a lot of interactions, not just with other drugs but also with your dietary salt intake.
@CowperKettle that's contradictory. It's basically saying that mirror life will find the numerous matches to targets in the human body normal life finds to establish an infection, yet immune systems and other organisms wouldn't find such targets within mirror life.
La rue des Filles du Calvaire est une voie parisienne, située à l'extrémité nord-est du 3e arrondissement
== Situation et accès ==
Elle est proche de la place de la République.
Ce site est desservi par la station de métro Filles du Calvaire.
== Origine du nom ==
Elle porte le nom du couvent des Filles-du-Calvaire qui y était situé en référence aux filles Sachot des Epesses.
== Historique ==
Elle est ouverte le 7 août 1698 et reçoit son nom actuel à cette occasion.
== Bâtiments remarquables et lieux de mémoire ==
No 6 : Dans Les Misérables, de Victor Hugo, lieu où habitent M.Gillenor...
@CowperKettle While George Washington put an end to the Tories in America, it was the contentiousness of human slavery which finally brought down the Whigs a few generations later. This dissolution left a gap for the then-new Republican Party to form with its explicit anti-slavery platform—ironic, given how pro-slavery most Republicans are now.
@jlliagre Yes, another statistical tie. I didn't finish yesterday's because I got busy with something else, but mainly I just stalled on the first one.
> 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” https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/survey-growing-number-us-adults-lack-literacy-skills-rcna183498
@M.A.R. So you are suggesting immigration is responsible for new people entering the country and taking down the rate of literacy?
@CowperKettle I am making fun of your post because it makes me seem better by comparison.
Apropos of this, I got a lovely spam this morning, offering SEO services: find screwups in my competitor's SEO; create harmful, toxic links likely to break their SEO.
I don't use GPT by default. But neither Google nor GPT find the right material. The right material tends to be from before the time when SEO became rampant.
@Cerberus I reckon they'll probably say /ˈfrenkojz ˈbejɹow/, disdaining the çurrender monkeys' cedilla as too prissy for red-blooded he-men to type or even consider.
In my experience, most people who have been around the block know how to pronounce François. How about açai? Here, in the Boston area, I have seen more and more: acai bowls, with no accent mark. And here's a new semi-scam-type thing. There is a company called Menchie's [they sell yogurt]. That's the sign on the door etc. BUT, only online they use the name: Acai super fruits, yes, it says by Menchie's.
But when doing deliveries for grubhub, the address was only Acai Super Fruits. And that is not street visible. The owner told me that is only an online marketing company name. The name is NOT in the shop or on the shop. I guess it's a tax thing. Anyway, açai is very, very bitter but people have bought the "it's-good-for-you" thing, which it is I guess.
The funniest is the French saying in French: Pernambuco. They just drop the o. Je suis allé à Pernambuc. [boo-k] And also their saying: Guadalajara, which comes out very often as: Guadalahaha. As for the Brits, there's always: Nica-rah-gewah. So funny. But with Ibiza, they insist on: Ibitha.
Actually, I don't believe I've ever heard a British person talking about tacos. But I believe you. They just seem to go on and on about kebabs and takeaways andp
utting the kettle on. I have a running joke with family. Can you guess when a character will talk about putting the kettle on in a tv series? I can always see it coming. I'm usually about 85% right.
It's so funny because I can't think of one similar "iconic" line in AmE Tv shows.
The egg came first. Once amphibians stayed on land and became reptiles, they developed hard shelled eggs, roughly in the late Permian, early Triassic. Then Birds developed in the mid-Cretaceous. Chickens (or the gallinaceous order) developed in the early Miocene (not that long ago). So, ergo, hence, then, ipso facto, obiter dictu, the egg came becore the chicken.
@tchrist This article strikes me as just...very strange.
It seems to insinuate that there's something bad--or even sinister--about holding political views that aren't particularly aligned with the orthodox left or right.
As if those are the only two legitimate or coherent or consistent political worldviews.
Why is it bad to follow authors from across the political spectrum? Surely someone who only follows writers from one side or the other ends up trapped in a bubble.
The author comes close outright calling himself an out-of-touch elite by expressing surprise at "what most non-elites consume."
Then there's this line:
> Unfortunately, if you’re reading this essay, you’re likely very, very out of touch.
So he apparently thinks essays in the Guardian are only consumed by elites, and out of touch ones at that? Strange. It's not the Economist or something, just a reasonably good center-left news source without a paywall.
> They found these Americans, predictably, defy conventional political categorization. They believe immigration should be decreased, abortion should be legal, the criminal justice system is not tough enough, the government should crack down on price-gouging, and same-sex marriage is just dandy. They practice hodgepodge politics, and they aren’t bothered by what elites would call ideological inconsistency.
If you think it's inconsistent to hold all those positions, you're not an elite, you're just, frankly, not very intelligent or not very well-educated or not very reflective or something.
Moreover, the very fact that these positions are widely held, and that someone who held them committed an act of violence, doesn't mean that those political views somehow lead to violence inevitably.
It would be extremely strange if they did, given that there's nothing in them that glorifies violence per se. It seems like he just happens to hold a somewhat unusual and complex set of political views; you'd have to be truly trapped in a bubble to find such people dangerous.
Just so weird, this article. I can't make heads or tails of it.
@alphabet I don't know about that particular list of positions, if they're inconsistent or not or partially inconsistent (there are so many different positions) but 1) it's very very easy to think of everything as black and white for each position -and- one of those is the right/good choice for other people (because that's how voting works, and frnakly language itself (people say 'are for for against this?', not 'on a scale of 1-10, how for or against are you?'
-and- 2) for oneself think that everything is nuanced and problematic and unsure -and- not realize that you yourself are inconsistent.
hm that was all mixed up.
That proves my point!
well, just for me.
ANyway, people writing these opinion articles are often just being forced to take their inchoate feelings and force them into crisp words to fill up a column.
If you stare into the abyss, the abyss just couldn't give a rat's ass.
I find the Guardian's op-eds to often be (on the occasional time I happen to run pass them) ... sort of ... I don't know... stereotypically like...
I don't know.
presumptupus?
I don't know how that can be a stereotype of anybody. But it feels consistently that way.
@alphabet That's the whole direction of the commentary it seems: this guy who did this bad thing X, does this one totally random other thing Y. therefore Y causes X.
@Mitch Surely there are readers who like those two. But Bret Stephens seems to hold a combination of views that I think everyone would find annoying for one reason or another.
Remember: he rails against cancel culture, but he tried to get a professor fired for jokingly calling him a "bedbug."
@jlliagre The Lisboetas also change their ei diphthongs into ai ones, making their milk leite sound more like English light than like English late. I wonder whether this is a general principle of some sort, given French. Or maybe it should never have made it into e anything when it was starting from something lactal in the first place and this is just retro. :)
@Mitch "Are you very wealthy? Did your parents donate us money for the new field hockey stadium? Alternatively, how do you feel about being a token minority?"
Perhaps I still suffer from getting my knuckles metaphorically rapt by a French teacher insistently reminding me that "there are no diphthongs in French".
@alphabet I read through it quickly but what I see is that if more and more people become like Mangioni (as regards that list of issues the author lists in the article) and have no where no hang their hat (on a political party/movement), more individuals will become prone to direct, violent action. Is that your reading?
@Cerberus no no, I'm saying America's always been a pretty diverse country, and recently immigrants (possibly older immigrants) have stopped trying to learn English as much as before.
@Cerberus well then either a new demographic is being included in the polls (new citizenship? New generation?) or the constant wave of immigration into America has become statistically significant compared to when it didn't show up in the polls.
Either way I don't think there's anything extraordinary going on
@Cerberus also possible. I don't think it's a coincidence that just as Trumpsters are about to rise to power again someone's raising a stink about this.
@M.A.R. What's odd about that survey is that nearly every country saw a decline in literacy rates over that time period. I suspect some sort of methodological problem, unless this is somehow a worldwide problem.
Like nearly 4/5 of all the countries they surveyed had a decline, some much larger than that of the US.