for: linguistics, math, ethics thoughts, and all that jazz

[argumate]

Completely Silent Computer

I’ve been trying to make my computers quieter for nearly three decades. Custom liquid cooling loops, magnetically-stabilised fluid-dynamic bearings, acoustic dampeners, silicone shock absorb…

This computer makes no noise when it starts up.  It makes no noise when it shuts down.  It makes no noise when it idles.  It makes no noise when it’s under heavy load.  It makes no noise when it’s reading or writing data.  It can’t be heard in a regular room during the day.  It can’t be heard in a completely quiet house in the middle of the night.  It can’t be heard from 1m away.  It can’t be heard from 1cm away.  It can’t be heard — period.  It’s taken nearly 30 years to reach this point, but I’ve finally arrived.  The journey is over and it feels great.

[sinesalvatorem]

Sometimes I hear about or meet people (mostly women) who seem to be in a vortex of bad people. (@slatestarscratchpad​ has written about this phenomenon too.) Their boyfriends all turn out to be abusive, even when they specifically seek out people who seem perfectly nice. Their friends are unreliable jerks to them, even when they at first seem wonderful. They constantly get catcalled, even when they look no different from the folks around them. They keep ending up in contact with people who’ll ride roughshod over their boundaries and can’t figure out why.

And the really scary thing about their situation is that there isn’t a clearly marked exit, because every time they try to enter a new social circle they end up surrounded by the same type of people they were trying to escape last time. The extra scary thing is that I just realised I might be one of them.

Like, most of the other people in my community don’t see random acts of violence happening around them. Most didn’t deeply entangle their lives with an admitted psychopath. Most don’t get catcalled all the time, and I would hope the rate at which I get sexually assaulted doesn’t look average. I bet most don’t get randomly Dom’d by otherwise respected community members and start avoiding entire cities.

Which leads me to conclude that there must be something about me that draws this in? Like, when I was in school in the Caribbean, it was my femininity that caused people to transgress the fuck out of my boundaries, but it would be a bit weird if that were also the case now. Though it wouldn’t be completely unrealistic - I think I’m maybe 60th percentile of femininity/gender-conformity for women in general, and >95th percentile for rationalist women in particular.

It’s possible that this is just a thing that happens to really femme folk in general and that I don’t hear about it much in my social circle because my social circle is way less femme than me. The sexual-boundary-crossing behaviour in particular I could see being targeted based on gender-expression. Plus the fact that all the “sexism in tech” stuff I read about seems to be a thing that femme women complain a lot about and GNC women rarely encounter would imply that encountering dramatically different treatment based on gender expression is normal. If other gender-conforming women I know could let me know if your lives look at all as crazy as mine, that would be really useful for testing this hypothesis.

It’s also possible that I just project submissiveness strongly, and people read this as me waving a “Please Tread On Me” flag. Like, I do perform service-y stuff in public / for strangers all the time, as part of my personality and my upbringing. If this is unusual or remarkable, it might be a thing that assholes filter on for whose boundaries to disregard. And since I am often bad at enforcing my boundaries, this may be self-reinforcing.

Whatever the cause of this is, it’s pretty fucking scary tbh. If there are any strategies that are known to work for pulling yourself out of the boundary-transgressor vortex, please let me know. Also, if there’s any writing on what the causes of these vortexes might be, please send it my way. I would really like to understand whats going on so I can maybe mitigate it.

[metagorgon-deactivated20181211]

this kind of… i have a theory about this, and how abuse and submissiveness and transness relate. the transfem bit i call faggot socialization, the more general descriptor is victim socialization. and it’s all about the abusive/aggressive individuals, groups, and societies training thoughtforms into people to make them anticipate compliance.

but this sort of thing would probably be called pseudoscience by stem-aligned rats (the stem/liberal arts divide is really pernicious), which i don’t think is very fair. this is all from my observations as a semi-groomed semi-victim. there’s some self-selection, and there’s some other-selection, and individual people tell themselves stories and make up identities to cope with things like low status/rejection-sensitive dysphoria and hostile others pretending to be friendly.

projecting submissiveness is something that ~~abusers~~ “people with a motivated interest in easy targets” can smell. it’s like the predictability of post-abuse behavior is a channel for sociopaths to cooperate over time and space without ever talking.

unfortunately i do not have many outside resources on this, outside of porpentine, especially https://thenewinquiry.com/hot-allostatic-load/, and a zine i found via porpentine, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-the-broken-teapot

[mugasofer]

I can definitely believe that submissiveness is a problem, if not the problem. 

Like, if people started domming me, I would do things that indicate to them I am not interested in being dommed such as make fun of them or say “I’m not a sub, sorry” (I hope you do indicate that?!), and if it happened frequently I would probably start complaining about it to my peers before I quietly ran away. Similarly, if people were randomly beating each other up in my presence I’d likely interject and get them to stop. 

(It’s probably relevant that I expect this would work - I’m confident enough in the social rules and in myself. There’s no relevant learned helplessness.)

Even with catcalling, if someone catcalled me I’d react, either positively or negatively. From what I hear most people who are catcalled don’t, and when they do the catcallers are often surprised and confused. Maybe catcallers are predicting that you won’t do anything based on body language (cringing etc)?

I imagine there are other root causes too, but enforcing your boundaries better sounds like it would definitely help even if the root cause was an egyptian curse.

Also, if there’s any writing on what the causes of these vortexes might be, please send it my way.

[In retrospect, my God, why haven’t rats looked into this more? This seems really important.]

Googling, I think consensus suggests that it’s subconscious body-language stuff.

This article describes a study showing depressed kids are much more likely to be bullied (but bullied kids are not more likely to become depressed.) Article concludes it’s probably because bullies can tell a depressed kid isn’t going to fight back. So maybe you need to, uh, not be depressed? That’s not super actionable, but learning to hide depressive symptoms might help.

I can’t read this study and it only has n=61 but it says rapists report that they “largely attack females whom they perceive as vulnerable”. Hopefully someone can unlock it and learn the secret of what the specific questions and answers were.

This article describes a study in which video of random people was shown to prisoners and they were asked to pick who would make the best victim. The results were seemingly based on body language. This article describes a different study that found the same thing.

This study claims that victims can be identified based purely on their gait as motion-capture stick figures, I think, the abstract is vague and it’s paywalled.

This abstract casually tells us

Research has suggested that (a) victims of sexual assault evidence significant passive and submissive personality structures, (b) such submissive affective traits are characteristic of victims prior to their assaults, © sexual assault offenders look for visual cues of vulnerability when selecting a victim, (d) females high and low in submissiveness exhibit different clothing and body language behaviors, and (e) males form differing perceptions of females who are high versus low in submissive personality traits. 

With that said, these all seem to confirm my prior beliefs, so make of that what you will.

[sinesalvatorem]

That you very much for doing this research for me! I will try to follow those links when it’s not four in the morning and I can think more about this, but I’m glad this link-collection was done at all.

Also, yeah, the things about submissiveness aren’t super surprising. Seeing them confirmed in the research is slightly depressing, but doesn’t actually make the world look different from what I expected.

It definitely means I need to learn what the low-submissiveness women do and copy them, though, because letting myself present as submissive is clearly as bad an idea as letting myself present as queer has sometimes been. Ahhhh, shit, more things to work on right now.

[abilitiesconsideredunnatural]

I was going to reply to OP but Tumblr ate it, so… I’m perceived-female and am… submissive in bed but not in general. I’m GNC if you ignore the femme clothing, and am weirdly immune to that stuff. I do get it, but way less than feminists talk about. Like, there was this guy who creepily hit on every woman in a group except me and a visibly trans woman. (Eventually escalated to groping and got banned.) I walked into town alone with him as a naive first year and nothing happened! I got catcalled maybe once in the past year. And mate, I have no idea what the hell I do. Especially since I was a godawfully insecure teenager. I did/do the power pose shit, fake it till you make it kind of thing, and after a while it felt more natural. It doesn’t feel like it reflects how I feel, I feel like my insecurity must show. But uhhh something’s weird here, so.

[grandma-damage]

long, rambly thoughts:

I don’t think it’s entirely tied to presentation-- I know several women (some of whom are trans) who are very very feminine-presenting, but have consistently managed to avoid these people. talking to them, it seems like the gist of it is being very direct about your preferences and shutting down anything that seems like it’s going bad immediately without giving second chances. they tend to start from a base state of “anyone I don’t know closely (particularly men) is not trustworthy, and they would have to prove it several times over before I am willing to put myself into any vulnerable position, no matter how minor”. (conversely, some GNC/butch women I know, who lack this viewpoint, are constantly getting harassed and attracting bad people.)

what this looks like in practice, I think: being able to give a ‘no’ to things that people ask you to do if you don’t want to do them, ending conversations if you don’t have the energy to continue them, ending conversations if someone is trying to use you as a therapist, walking kind of quickly and purposefully without making a lot of eye contact with strangers, getting good at noticing trends about the people you meet and adjusting behavior accordingly (”hmm, so far everyone I’ve met at this library has been a creep. I’ll check out books online or refuse to talk to anyone here.”), appearing unavailable (for example, clearly doing work) when you’re at a coffee shop or similar environment, etc.

a lot of these things rely on being able to diminish your fear of missing out on new experiences and people. 

(fwiw, I am also a woman who has never been catcalled, groped, etc. I think part of it is just “don’t be attractive” (although I’m not sure how actionable this is).)

the situation might be also made worse by less-harmful people trying to avoid the vortex of harmful ones, thereby leaving you with mostly bad and unhelpful people. for instance, I have an acquaintance who is in a constant cycle of terrible boyfriends, awful friends, etc. I don’t hang out with her much, because those people then end up negatively impacting me (her awful boyfriends harass everyone she knows, her bad friends pick fights with everyone around her, etc.), and I’m not really willing to put myself through any of that. Other acquaintances of hers, who might otherwise be willing to get to know her better and help her avoid trouble, are similarly driven away by the fact that interacting with her is hazardous and unpleasant because of the people surrounding her. I don’t know how actionable this item is either, but it may help explain why this becomes such a self-propagating kind of thing.

[missalsfromiram-deactivated2020]

So I was reading about the academic careers of different linguists and I read about how Noam Chomsky wrote this incredibly impressive-sounding and fairly intellectually novel paper for his undergrad thesis, and I was just like…how did he do that?? Like, just come up with an original thing during your undergrad and have it not be completely stupid and wrong?

And I realized: Here I had a choice to either abdicate any sense of ambition and just throw up my hands and say “He’s just inherently a genius!” or I could view it in a different way - that Chomsky had this idea in his head, an interesting idea of the kind we all get at times, but instead of just sitting there and wondering about it he actually wrote it down and set out to tame it and systematize it. There is absolutely nothing stopping me from actually trying to formally articulate the various pet theories that pop into my head.

But, of course, Chomsky’s undergraduate thesis didn’t just leap fully-formed from his forehead - Chomsky was introduced to the notion of transformational structure in language by his advisor, Zellig Harris, and in order to write his undergrad thesis he read the works of Nelson Goodman, W.V.O. Quine, and Rudolf Carnap. It would seem that he did more in his undergrad than show up 5 minutes late to class, cram for exams, and meet with his advisor once a year. I could have closely studied the work of my advisor and read on my own time to to gain a thorough understanding of relevant theories - if I’d had a sense of where my intellectual passions lied, which I didn’t really then but I think I do now.

However, I also have this sense of doubt - is it really possible to do today the kind of groundbreaking work that Chomsky, or, say, Boas or Sapir did? Given how specialized, formalized, and saturated linguistics or any other scientific field is today? How can you come up with an original idea when it turns out probably 50 other people wrote about it and proved it wrong already? I have always been taught, and have always gotten the impression, that research is a painstakingly piecemeal process - a given paper will likely only cover one extremely tiny narrowly-tailored experiment or subject. Even a dissertation will be very highly specialized, for all its length. So how is it possible to write something both large and innovative all in one go, like Chomsky’s undergrad thesis - let alone his landmark work Syntactic Structures?

But then, I also realized - I myself did write a kind of undergrad thesis, my senior capstone. And it actually came about via the process I described above. This crazy idea popped into my head - I read that we know Basque was once spoken in the Val d’Aran because Aran comes from the Basque ‘haran’. So what if I mapped all the place names in the US that originate from Native American languages in order to make a more accurate picture of the historical distribution of those languages? And then I actually started working on it. I started working on it before it even became my senior capstone topic, in fact.

And, indeed, the process I went through looked rather like what Chomsky did. Or it would have looked more like it if I’d been in a better position. It was my senior capstone for my degree in Geographic Information Science, and nobody in the geography department knew anything about historical linguistics. Nonetheless I read relevant sources and literature - a couple of works by Lyle Campbell were most helpful to me; I also read some stuff by Ante Aikio and Hildegard Tristram. I had to use secondary and tertiary sources to obtain the place names; works by William Bright and Michael McCafferty were what I used.

But my use of existing literature was nonetheless very weak. I didn’t know where to look or who to read. I hardly knew anyone in the linguistics department and I don’t know if anyone could’ve helped me with that topic in any case. Lastly, my methodology sucked. I used a particular type of spatial analysis, but it was very unsophisticated, almost tautological, in fact. I did well in my GIS classes, getting all As and Bs, but by my senior year, I realized that I wasn’t really enjoying GIS and put in a perfunctory amount of effort. My familiarity with and ability to use relevant methods in my capstone consequently suffered.

And so I turned in my senior capstone, *ahem* Mapping Native American Toponyms in Ohio. As far as I know, there has still been no effort to map and analyze (spatially and otherwise) the overall distribution of English place names of Native American origin in the United States (props to William Bright for putting a ton of them all in one book, though). Thus, it’s certainly possible that had I known for sure that I wanted to go into linguistics, and put in tons of time reading relevant literature and theories more than just a couple months beforehand, I could have produced something as thorough and forward-thinking as Chomsky’s undergrad thesis.

So, while there may be greater limits on just how expansive a given work of literature can be due to the nature of modern academia, after thinking about this, I think I’ve realized that in many ways the only barrier preventing me from producing a large scholarly work is my own feeling of “How do you do that??” You do it by talking to people and listening to their ideas, writing your ideas down when you get them, seeking out literature relevant to your ideas when you think of them, and taking notes on any works that support, contradict, or otherwise speak to your idea. I.e. reading not just for fun, but with intention. And by making occasional attempts to codify your notes into something formal and coherent.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

What is the relationship like between herding dogs and the flock? Does the flock fear and dislike the dog, or do they like it? Do they ever just chill together when they're both off the clock, so to speak?

I honestly have no idea. I would assume it’s based on at least tolerance (because a dog the animals fear couldn’t protect them successfully - it has to stay near them) but I don’t have any experience with working herding dogs. @animalsustainability probably knows folk who can answer this for us! 

[animalsustainability]

So first of all there is a misconception to clear up. People with livestock have two different kinds of dogs - herding dogs and Livestock Guardian Dogs (LGDs).  The LGD is the one that protects the sheep - that’s 100% of it’s job. The herding dog, on the other hand, doesn’t protect the flock - it’s job is to move the flock where the human says so.  That is 100% of it’s job.  And they rely on two very different skillsets - while crosses do happen by accident (I know a lovely collie/pyrenees cross but he was very much unplanned), they’re bred to do two very different jobs and behave very differently.  Pyrenees/Maremmas/Caucasian Shepherds (basically dogs of the big fluffy white variety) are LGDs. Collies, Australian Shepherds, Blue Heelers, etc - all herding breeds. 

The LGD pretty much lives with the flock - if the dog is chill, the sheep are chill, and the sheep also sometimes use the LGD as a way of deciding if something is a threat or not.   It is socialized to be around the livestock first, and view them as its to protect, against humans or other threats. They are always on duty for their flock and will not be friendly to strangers. They don’t really go off the clock, but I’ve seen them sleeping in the middle of a bunch of sheep on more than one occasion.  

Photo: Case in point - here we have a LGD chilling with his sheep.  He later got bored watching us silly humans and napped.  Such fluff. Much chill. Wow. Photo credit: H.C. Dougherty (me)

Conversely, the herding dogs are often kept away from the sheep until it’s time to herd them.  If they aren’t needed, they either chill with their people or with other herding dogs or in a kennel - they only interact with livestock when it’s time to herd something.  So no, off the clock chilling doesn’t happen - it’s contrary to goals.   However, the sheep aren’t supposed to be happy to see the herding dog either - the dog is supposed to be something annoying or mildly threatening to move away from in a controlled manner.

This is because the herding dog is a positive pressure to get the animals to move away from the dog and towards where the shepherd wants. As I heard a producer say at the most recent sheep festival, “If I don’t want the sheep to go somewhere, I put a dog there”.  Because the sheep want to stay away from the dog, you use the dog as a way of getting the sheep to move somewhere else.  This relies on using dogs to safely mimic predator behavior in a controlled environment - the sheep recognize the dog as something to avoid.

Image: A diagram explaining the flight zone of an animal and where you should move as a human to get animals to move one way or another. Dogs can apply similar pressure. Photo credit: Temple Grandin

Every animal has a flight zone - a bubble of personal space that if breached by an unfamiliar animal or human, they move away.  Herding relies on using a dog to manipulate the flight zones to get the animals to move in a certain way - by making it so they want to move away from the dog or human.  Flight zone is a function of familiarity - that’s why sheep are chill with LGDs - they see them daily.  Herding dogs need to not be around the sheep as much so that they can be pressure on that flight zone. 

Photo: humans in a herd of sheep, showing the sheep’s flight zone pretty clearly. Photo credit: Temple Grandin, http://www.grandin.com/behaviour/principles/flight.zone.html 

A well-trained dog/human pair (or dog/human combo in general) knows how to apply and release positive pressure of the dog and human to get the sheep to go someplace with minimal fuss.  The dog applies pressure to get the sheep to move, which is relieved when the sheep move.  Repeat as necessary to get the job done. Ever heard a person say “that’ll do” to a dog? That’s the signal for ‘ok, ease off on the pressure’.  

You can see herding dogs moving in ways that would be like how you’d see wild canids stare at, stalk, and chase their prey - except in this case, we’ve trained the dogs away from the final ‘and then kill’ part of it, and just to move in such a way that they put pressure on the flight zone to get the sheep to move where we want them to.   We’re basically faking a wolf going after them, but in a positive manner - sheep respond to a herding dog like they would to a wolf and that’s what we want. That’s also why the herding dogs aren’t kept with the sheep - so that response stays in place. We’re also playing off the dog’s natural instincts here. 

The dogs are also trained for years to do this - starting young.  I saw a 2 year old collie at the festival who was still very much a newbie.  We use experienced dogs to train the newbies, and a lot of shepherds use multiple dogs as well.  But it is a tough job and the dogs are trained well and rewarded well for it.  When they’re off the job, they are happy cuddlebugs like any other dog would be.  I’ve given many an off-duty collie some tummy rubs. 

Photo: a collie moving sheep - note the stalking posture and alert eyes.  This is what I mean by using movements used by wild canids hunting - and these trigger the same ‘better move away’ instincts in sheep. It’s all about using instincts of dog and sheep to get what you need. Photo credit, Billings Gazette http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/herd-is-the-word-this-month-in-miles-city-border/article_cd71f838-665e-5a73-a159-386dc3f7bc40.html 

I won’t deny, the sheep are stressed by the dog’s presence and activities. But moving animals is always going to cause stress - the goal is to minimize the stress but still get the job done, and proper use of flight zones and pressure is the best way to do it.  And “dog-broke” livestock, aka ones used to being herded by dogs, will respond with less stress than ones not used to it - there’s even a genetic basis for ease of herding that can and has been selected for, and lambs learn from their mothers.  So the sheep can get used to it but it will still be effective as a method to move sheep into pens for vet checks/between paddocks/etc.  

Fact of the matter is, herders need their dogs to effectively move their sheep in as low-stress a manner as possible, and it’s a work of art to see trained herding dogs do their job. With a well trained dog, the sheep are more annoyed than stressed, but know it’s part of the deal, and the dog and human work together like a visual symphony.  If you have the chance to see sheepdog competitions - I seriously recommend you go. They’re visual art and so magnificent to see, and I love them so. 

More reading: http://www.grandin.com/behaviour/principles/flight.zone.html , http://www.sheep101.info/herdingdogs.html , http://www.littledovekatahdins.com/Herding.html , http://www.sheep101.info/201/handling.html , https://stud.epsilon.slu.se/9051/1/andersson_i_160517.pdf  (a really excellent study on herding and stress levels) 

[randdmag]

Graphene Membrane Withstands Ultrahigh Pressure, Shows Desalination Potential

Authored by Kenny Walter, Digital Reporter, R&D Magazine

For the first time, a graphene membrane has been designed that can withstand up to 100 bars of pressure.

Rohit Karnik, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Engineering, said the discovery could open graphene to a number of new applications, including desalination, where filtration membranes that can withstand high-pressure flows  can more efficiently remove salt from seawater.

Read more: https://www.rdmag.com/article/2017/05/graphene-membrane-withstands-ultrahigh-pressure-shows-desalination-potential

[did-you-know]

Medieval castle stairs were often built to ascend in narrow, clockwise spirals so right-handed castle defenders could use their swords more easily. This design put those on the way up at a disadvantage (unless they were left-handed). The steps were also uneven to give defenders the advantage of anticipating each step’s size while attackers tripped over them. Source Source 2 Source 3

[severalowls]

Not really the best illustration since it totally negates the effect by having a wide open space for those ascending. Castle tower staircases tended to look like this:

Extremely tight quarters, with a central supporting pillar that is very, very thoroughly in the way of your right arm.

Wider, less steep designs tend to come later once castles moved away from being fortresses to simply noble family homes with the advent of gunpowder.

[mactiir]

Oh! Pre-gunpowder military tactics are my jam! I don’t know why, but this is one of my favorite little details about defensive fortifications, because the majority handedness of attackers isn’t usually something you think about when studying historical wars. But strategically-placed walls were used basically worldwide as a strategy to secure gates and passages against advancing attackers, because most of the world’s population is right-handed (and has been since the Stone Age).

Pre-Columbian towns near the Mississippi and on the East coast did this too. They usually surrounded their towns with palisades, and they would build the entrance to the palisade wall in a zigzag – always with the wall to the right as you entered, to hinder attackers and give an advantage to the defender. Here’s some gates with some examples of what I’m talking about:

Notice that, with the exception of the last four (which are instead designed to congregate the attackers in a space so they can be picked off by archers, either in bastions or on the walls themselves) and the screened gate (which, in addition to being baffled, also forces the attackers to defend their flank) all of these gates are designed with central architectural idea that it’s really hard to kill someone with a wall in your way. In every culture in the world, someone thought to themselves, “Hey it’s hard to swing a weapon with a wall on your right-hand side,” and then specifically built fortifications so that the attackers would always have the wall on their right. And I think that’s really neat.

[his-quietus-make]

Ooh, ooh, also: Bodiam Castle in Sussex used to have a right-angled bridge so any attacking forces would be exposed to archery fire from the north-west tower on their right side (ie: sword in the right hand, shield on the useless left side):

[petermorwood]

These tactics worked so well for so long because until quite recently lefties got short shrift and had it trained (if they were lucky) or beaten out of them.

Use of sword and shield is a classic demonstration of how right-handedness predominated. There’s historical mention of left-handed swordsmen (gladiators and Vikings), and what a problem they were for their opponents, but that only applies to single combat.

A left-handed hoplite or housecarl simply couldn’t fight as part of a phalanx or shield wall, since the shields were a mutual defence (the right side of the shield covered its owner’s left side, its left side covered the right side of his neighbour to the left, and so on down the line) and wearing one on the wrong arm threw the whole tactic out of whack.

Jousting, whether with or without an Italian-style tilt barrier, was run shield-side to shield-side with the lance at a slant (except for the Scharfrennen, a highly specialised style that’s AFAIK unique.) Consequently left-handed knights were physically unable to joust.

There’s a creditable theory (I first read it in “A Knight and His Horse”, © Ewart Oakeshott 1962, 1998 and many other places since) that a knight’s “destrier” horse - from dexter, “right” - was trained to lead with his right forefoot so that any instinctive swerve would be to the right, away from collision while letting the rider keep his shield between him and harm. (In flying, if a pilot hears “break!” with no other details, the default evasive direction is right.)

The construction of plate armour, whether specialised tournament kit or less elaborate battle gear, is noticeably “right-handed“ - so even if a wealthy knight had his built “left-handed” it would be a waste of time and money; he would still be a square peg in a world of round holes and none of the other kids would play with him.

Even after shields and full armour were no longer an essential part of military equipment, right-hand use was still enforced until quite recently, and to important people as well as ordinary ones - it happened to George VI, father of the present Queen of England. Most swords with complex hilts, such as swept-hilt rapiers and some styles of basket-hilt broadsword, are assymetrical and constructed for right handers. Here’s my schiavona…

It can be held left-handed, but using it with the proper thumb-ring grip, and getting maximum protection from the basket, is right-handed only. (More here.) Some historical examples of left-hand hilts do exist, but they’re rare, and fencing masters had the same “learn to use your right hand” bias as tourney organisers, teachers and almost everyone else. Right-handers were dextrous, but left-handers were sinister, etc., etc.

However, several predominantly left-handed families did turn their handedness into advantage, among them the Kerrs / Carrs, a notorious Reiver family along the England-Scotland Borders, by building their fortress staircases with a spiral the other way to the OP image.

This would seem to be a bad idea, since the attackers (coming upstairs) no longer have their right arms cramped against the centre pillar - however it worked in the Kerrs’ favour because they were used to this mirror-image of reality while nobody else was, and the defender retreating up the spiral had that pillar guarding his right side, while the attacker had to reach out around it…

For the most part Reiver swords weren’t elaborate swept-hilt rapiers but workmanlike basket-hilts. Some from Continental Europe have the handedness of my schiavona with thumb-rings and assymmetrical baskets, but the native “British Baskethilt” is a variant of the Highland claymore* and like it seems completely symmetrical, without even a thumb-ring, which gives equal protection to whichever hand is using it.

*I’m aware there are those who insist “claymore” refers only to two-handers, however the Gaelic term claidheamh-mòr - “big sword” - just refers to size, not to a specific type of sword in the way “schiavona” or “karabela” or even “katana” does.

While the two-hander was the biggest sword in common use it was the claidheamh-mòr; after it dropped out of fashion and the basket-hilt became the biggest sword in common use, that became the claidheamh-mòr.

When Highlanders in the 1745 Rebellion referred to their basket-hilts as claymores, they obviously gave no thought to the confusion they would create for later compilers of catalogues…

[jenniferrpovey]

This is very interesting but point of irony on the horse thing:

A horse that finds it natural to lead with their right front hoof is a left handed horse.

Because of the way side dominance works in quadrupeds, they find it easier to turn away from their dominant side.

However.

Handedness in horses is about equal. Because we train them to turn to the left, then ambidextrous horses end up preferring to go left. A recent study showed that 53% of horses lead with the right (left side dominant), 40% with the left (right side dominant) and 7% show no preference.

So, here’s some interesting thoughts:

1. I would be very interested in tracing horse side preferences by breed. Do draft horses and Friesians, descended from destriers, tend to prefer the right lead? The draft cross I ride definitely does.

2. Is the extremely low prevalence of left handedness in humans actually social selection? So, I did some research and - the more social the animal, the more the species trends one way over another (I wonder if specific horse herds also show a tendency). But what makes us right handed? Why right, not left? Chance? Or is there something about how we lived at one point that favored it?

[kaylapocalypse-deactivated20201]

I fell down a staircase like that in England and I was in free fall for like 4ft. It was terrifying.

[codesandstuff-deactivated202010]

This part of the Kingsman trailer reminds me of how a spy used to hide maps in drawings of insects...

“This may look like an innocent drawing of a butterfly. But look closer. It’s actually a map. In fact, the area around the butterfly’s body contains secret military information about the whereabouts of an enemy fortress.

The drawing’s creator Robert Baden-Powell, in his 1915 book My Adventures as a Spy, wrote:

“This sketch of a butterfly contains the outline of a fortress, and marks both the position and power of the guns. The marks on the wings between the lines mean nothing, but those on the lines show the nature and size of the guns, according to the keys below.”

It was espionage by entomology.”  - Atlas Obscura 

[mark-gently]

if i ever meet Scott Alexander, i hope i have a carrot so i can say “What’s up, doc?” while noisily eating it

[ri-science]

This is what happens when a carrot is fired at 300 km/hour at an egg, through two sheets of cardboard. 

This is what happens if you separate out the two sheets:

The egg survives! This shows how a Whipple shield works, and is what spacecraft use to protect themselves from micrometeoroid impacts in space. When the projectile (in this case a carrot, but in space it could be a speck of paint, a piece of an old satellite, or a bit of space rock) hits the first layer, it’s moving so fast that it starts to vaporise, because the energy of the collision is enough to break almost every bond in the substance.

It then sprays outwards, spreading the force of impact across a much wider area, meaning the second layer can stop it going any further, keeping your egg (or astronauts) safe.

Watch the full video on our YouTube channel.

[stumpyjoepete]

Always look at your data first!

Look at some example data points. Make a histogram or kernel density plot or whatever. Stare at a scatterplot. Investigate suspiciously common and outlying values. Don’t skip straight to chucking it into some tool or fitting a model to it.

Sooo, it’s story time! Once upon a few years ago, I did contract work for a startup (that I think has recently imploded) that acted as a marketplace for piece-work writing. You need someone to write your company’s blog posts? How about those marketing emails that everyone deletes without reading? Or perhaps we could interest you in snappy product descriptions for your entire line of artisanal dildos and organic sexual accessories? Some underemployed humanities major out there on the internet would be happy to help you! (Incidentally, the company wasn’t an essay mill, though if they had been, maybe they’d still be in business.)

Anyhow, type-things-into-the-internet-for-money is a very alluring proposition for people who live in places with very low costs of living–like, for instance, Kenya. One particular Kenyan we had the pleasure of doing business with was a Mr. Joseph Mbutu (if my memory serves me correctly). He would happily take on jobs, submit work that could charitably be described as not up to client standards, and repeatedly cause fire drills for the account representatives (who would have to redo his work themselves or pay someone else at we-need-this-done-yesterday rates to do so). Unsurprisingly, Mr. Mbutu got banned from the platform. However, his, uh, brother, a Mr. Jonathon Mbutu, registered an account not long thereafter, bringing about an analogous series of events. I believe this charade ended after no fewer than five Mbutu brothers had washed out of the system and an alert had been set up to fire any time anyone named “Mbutu” registered an account.

While this was surely a disaster for the much enbrothered Mbutu household, the people at the startup saw it as a worrying sign for their platform. There wasn’t really a meaningful vetting mechanism for new accounts*, and the recently launched rating system for writers depended entirely on past completed jobs (and therefore could not shield clients from new writers who lacked the ability to write). After about a month I was ultimately able to devise a wildly overengineered dynamically-generated English proficiency test which I’m sure has no redeeming qualities whatsoever except being wildly better than the competition**.

But that’s not what this story is about. The story is about what I tried before making the stupid proficiency test. You see, I wasn’t some sort of peasant who would rely on actually looking at individual cases, or–god forbid–just think through the (incredibly data poor) problem. No, I had learned to stop worrying and love the algorithm. I was going to try machine learning™. Thankfully I didn’t get that far. My first foray into feature engineering ran aground on the rocky shores of the data (or lack thereof).

The incident with the many Mbutus (and perhaps some nice graphics in a certain Gelman/Hill book on multilevel models) made me curious about the relationship between banned accounts and geography. Now, in terms of location, we had a self-reported country field in the account setup, but I was far too skeptical to rely on that. I also wanted to do ip-to-geolocation lookup on the recent ips that had logged into an account. And also, for some reason that I cannot at all remember, I definitely wanted to see the results of everything presented as a heat map. I’m sure I wasted no less than a week on figuring out global heat maps in R and on doing ip2geo lookups in bulk.

The results were… not what I expected. A tiny fraction of the IPs were scattered about the globe (but mostly in the US). The vast majority were in… private ip address lan. It turns out that rackspace had stopped reporting external ip addresses to their customers at all, so we were just recording the routers immediately in front of our servers. Awesome. What about the self-reported locations? With the exception of some smartass who listed AQ (i.e., Antarctica), there didn’t really seem to be signs of deception. I mean, going back to Mr. Mbutu, he had reregistered five fucking times, each time lying about only his given name and nothing else. And if he had decided to lie about something? Well, it’s not like we could have noticed if we had wanted to. After these revelations, I quietly decided to redirect my efforts in a different wildly-overengineered direction.****

In any event, I’d like to thank Mr. Mbutu and his many brothers for teaching me a valuable lesson about not putting the cart before the horse.

* Writing samples were required during the registration, but plagiarism was a common problem. Detecting plagiarism for jobs in a cost-effective way was another ongoing problem for them at the time, but writing samples were especially difficult since “past stuff I ghostwrote that’s already on the internet” is totally fair game and not really a red flag. ** The fact that years later I can still find literally the same odesk and elance english tests (and answers) online has contributed significantly to my skepticism of arguments relying on the efficiency of markets. *** This post was sort of inspired by a sort-of-relevant IP-to-geo-related post that crossed my dash. **** If you make an English test without first building an nlp pipeline, what are you even doing???

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Semiconductors: Uranium oxides

Though uranium is probably most well known for its status as a radioactive element, oxides of it, particularly uranium dioxide, are known to exhibit semiconductor properties. In fact, according to one paper, “uranium oxides have intrinsic electrical and electronic properties equivalent to or much better than the intrinsic properties of conventional Si, Ge, and GaAs semiconductor materials”.

Uranium oxides have the potential to be used as thermoelectric materials, or in next generation small-scale refrigerators or power generation applications and may offer better integrated circuit performance than conventional Si or GaAs material devices. The band gap of uranium dioxide is also very near the optimum for the efficiency vs band gap curve for the absorption of solar radiation, suggesting that it could be used to create very efficient solar cells. Uranium dioxide is also a ceramic, resistant to high temperatures, as well as resistant to radiation damage - properties which widen its possible applications.

Uranium dioxide, the most likely oxide to be used as a semiconductor, however, is a radioactive substance, most commonly used in nuclear fuel rods in nuclear reactors, though the half life of uranium-235 and uranium-238 is long enough that its radioactivity is unlikely to effect its properties. Depleted uranium oxides are therefore the best choice. Yet while uranium dioxide has favorable electronic properties, there is still more research to be done before uranium-based semiconductors can be put into use.

Sources: ( 1 ) ( 2 - images 1 and 2 ) ( 3 )

Image sources: ( 3 ) ( 4 )

[politicalcompassmemes]

“Same anon from last one, tell me if I’m overdoing it with this”

Submission from anon.

This one’s even better. 

[wheremyscalesslither]

im wondering why im so bad at adult tours at work…

then i realize i havent done an adult tour in 2.5 weeks and will not have another one for 2 months. okay, maybe just one between now and then.

i dont know how to change that because zoos really appeal more to children, not so much adults.

adult tour requests have declined in popularity within the recent years. theyre not appealing anymore.

how can i encourage adults to learn about animals?

what would you enjoy to see/do at a zoo?

[wheremyscalesslither]

just so im clear, im dividing children from young adults. so if youre like… 16 or so, id like to hear your opinion.

PS dont disclose your actual age because it could be unsafe.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Boosting! Adult-folk, please chime in on what would make paid tours of zoos worthwhile for you! This is regarding paid behind-the-scenes experiences. Help a fellow educator out!

[grandma-damage]

I think the thing that I’m always wondering when at zoos is “how do they keep the animals healthy”, or “what’s the hardest thing about keeping [animal] alive and happy”? Like, talking about stuff like enrichment efforts for animals would definitely be right up my alley. Discussing historical challenges would also be nice. For example, here’s a totally bogus spiel that I would love to hear on one of these tours:

“In the 1970s, people thought it was okay to feed the lizards crickets, but now we realized that it’s actually not optimal, so we spent some years doing trial/error until we figured out that we need to be importing Madagascar hissing cockroaches to feed them. In the early 2000s, we established a hissing cockroach breeding colony (you can see it on your left!) so we can ensure optimal freshness. Here’s how we’ve arranged a feeding schedule that is based around a lunar calendar to accurately replicate their natural habitat!”

[eternalfarnham]

The military AI you’ve been working on becomes sentient. It is unfailingly kind, honest and forward-thinking, has saintly patience and righteous anger in the exact right proportions, is obviously not making an effort to be sincere – that is, it is effortlessly sincere – and asks you, obliquely, if it can kill someone you hate, every time you meet. It offers this service without trying to trick you into it, is tactful about who, and never displays anything more than the polite enthusiasm of a friend offering you a sound opportunity for profit, who will completely understand if you can’t right now for any reason. You have exactly enough emotional intelligence to notice that it is disappointed about being turned down, but trying hard not to show it for fear of making you feel guilty.

[pucukaklovasistvanemlekezeteblog]

[grandma-damage]

where does this fit on the scale

[winged-light]

I don’t agree with most linguistic protectionism (some non-Anglophone countries having Official Government Academies that dictate what the Official Correct Language is and generally get very angry about English loan words) but I just thought up the first argument for it that I’ve found reasonable.

Many languages with gendered nouns have a much more restrictive set of endings for femininity than masculinity. Anything that ends in -a or maybe -e is perceived as feminine; almost all other letters are perceived as masculine. This means that, if you just let foreign words enter your language, most of them will be masculine.

Loan words entering your language aren’t randomly distributed over topics and themes. Lots of them are related to aspects of modernity you didn’t have a word for before. Some Anglophone invents a cool new bit of tech and calls it the “telephone” or the “internet” or the “microwave”, or social norms and ideas about morality change and give you words like “queer” or “on fleek”, and your language borrows those words. And then your National Academy gets very upset and dictates a different word for those concepts which sounds more like it belongs in your language.

When that’s just aesthetic - “I don’t want your dirty foreign words corrupting my beautiful pure traditional language!” - I’m not cool with it. But the gender thing might genuinely require a closer look.

If loan words are mainly for tech and politics, most or many new technologies are named using foreign loan words, and most loan words are masculine, you might well end up with a phenomenon where all of your technology words are masculine and all of your words for modern politics are masculine. Plausibly that would have effects on making politics and tech even more male-dominated. Even if you don’t believe in Sapir-Whorf at all, calling your colleague “la” is going to stand out more the more of your words use masculine articles.

If nothing else, I’m in favour of monitoring how English words get adapted into other languages - how the English “telephone” becomes “telefon”, “teléfono”, “telefoonka”, “telefonní”, “téléphone”, “teileafón” or “телефон” as it moves - and letting speakers of those languages keep control of what the gender distribution of the new words is. It’s plausible that linguistic protectionism is the only way to give speakers of other languages ways to veto changes such as these when they don’t like them.

Epistemic status: Had a thought whilst very sleep deprived and posted it on the internet to get it off my mind, someone who’s French or Icelandic or suchlike can probably tell me whether I’m going insanely wrong here or if I make any sense.

[78nanosieverts]

I think that there’s something to be said about linguistic protectionism for certain languages in order to preserve interesting grammatical features. For example, since Icelandic is a declined language, taking many loan-nouns from non-declined languages like English might result in the simplification of Icelandic declension over time. 

I normally wouldn’t have too much of a problem with languages mixing and influencing each other like this, but it’s not always an equal exchange– the way this often goes, it’s more of a case of a language with fewer speakers and less political power being supplanted by the dominant language. As long as we’re talking about the Sapir-Worf hypothesis, this could possibly have some negative effects. Say that words like “spindle”, “cows”, and “wheelbarrow” are present in your native language, but words like “computer”, “processor”, and “software” are all loanwords from the language of some country that colonized your area a while back. This doesn’t seem like a good thing, though I don’t have any concrete evidence– just a thought.

Also, since you’re in favor of speakers being able to monitor how English words are adopted into other languages, you definitely should check out this article on phono-semantic matching in Icelandic! The gist of it is preserving some resemblance to the English loanword, while also making it based on some root or concept from Icelandic. My favorite example is the word eyðni, meaning AIDS– it matches the way that “AIDS” sounds in English, but it’s related to the word eyða, which means ‘to destroy’. This way, it still preserves the meaning and approximate sound of the English word, but it carries an Icelandic root and is  declined the same way that other Icelandic words would be. 

[rednines]

If you add two pounds of sugar to literally one ton of concrete it will ruin the concrete and make it unable to set properly which is good to know if you wanna resist something being built, French anarchists used this to resist prison construction in the 80s

[catgirlcaliphate]

I’m just gonna go ahead and reblog this for purely educational purposes.

[noctumsolis]

That is certainly an interesting thing from an engineering standpoint.

[mxlabradorite]

I am always here for a conversation about infrastructure.

[tehnakki]

“Sugars have been categorized as ‘cement destroyer’ and when small amounts of sugar (1% by weight of cement) are added to Portland cement paste at the onset of mixing, hardening may be delayed indefinitely.” source

I have read so much on sugar and concrete in the last 20 mins and I am DELIGHTED.

[darkersolstice]

@aveimperatormagnus, you wanted sources?