"I saw mnxmnkmnd and thought it was a spam thing" - saladofstones i am a spam thing. I have rotted to death in this gas station. I have quit tumblr. If you want to contact me, I will be Jack on irc.esper.net or Bike on irc.freenode.net for a while, aeshtaer on gmail until google gets bored and shuts it down, and mnxmnkmnd on twitter until they go bankrupt.
I don't know what this emotion is. It is uniformly unpleasant. I say "uniformly" because I feel numbness all around my body with no rhyme or reason. Activities feel unpleasant. Writing this description for my own later reference is unpleasant. I have work to perform but concentrating feels like it would be unpleasant. I clutch my head as if I have a headache but it's completely painless. I feel twitchy but I don't think I'm actually twitching. I don't have a name for this. Maybe just "unpleasantness".
The psuedo-biology thing reminds me that one day I stayed behind to talk with my anthro professor about someone. Some dude was asking him about if there was anything credible about how some races are just smarter than others. And was trying to argue about how the fucking head thing was valid and my professor just kind of shut him down.
Fun fact: there are quite a few forensic anthropologists who hold that you can tell skeleton differences between races, despite numerous studies showing that you might be able to tell the difference between a black and white American, but not with any real reliability or certainty, and you can basically only tell the difference between a black and white American, and not an Asian or Hispanic American and a white American.
i pretty seriously think assigning american college students The Mind of Primitive Man or a more modern similar book would be a pretty swell idea
like just, pretty much everything you're saying is gone over in this book from 1911
walking into anthropology class is like entering the Bad Opinions Zone, even if your professor has enough stories about pot to keep everyone entertained
“Truth or Fiction Revisited: Like heterosexuals, most gay people have a gender identity that is consistent with their anatomic sex. J. Micheal Bailey (2003b) writes that some “extremely gay” people become transgendered—that is, adopt the lifestyle of people of the other gender within our culture.”
“Truth or Fiction Revisited: Gender-reassignment surgery cannot implant the internal reproductive organs of the other anatomic sex. Therefore, it is not accurate to say that people have actually changed their sexes through gender-reassignment surgery.“
“But some researchers contend that many men who seek to become women tend to fall into other categories: either men who are extremely feminine or men who are sexually aroused by the idea of becoming a woman. The first category includes homosexual transgendered men—men who are extremely feminine gays and not fully satisfied by sexual activity with other males (Blanchards 1989; Cantor, 2011). The second category refers to males who are autogynephilic, or sexually stimulated by fantasies of their own bodies being female (Moser, 2010; Nuttbrock et al., 2011)”
“Homosexual transgendered males usually show cross gender preferences in play and dress in early childhood.”
That’s it. I’m done with psychology. Fuck this field forever.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
spoilers.
right, so, this was good.
a lot of stuff i like is bad. i like lovecraft a lot, for instance. lovecraft varied between being okay at prose, just in terms of the pleasure of reading, the words, you know, and abysmal at it. plots were somewhere between very good and schlock. so on, so forth.
nonetheless i get a lot out of lovecraft. i could say, unironically, that "lovecraft is deep". i would normally say it with some irony, to make clear that i don't think racism is cool and such, but i could.
this story here, the one i linked, is about getting a lot out of bad stories, or at least that's how i read it. nostalgebraist based it off his experiences on a xenogears/saga/whatever fan forum, or something. it is about an internet forum getting a lot out of stories.
this kind of naturally verges into insanity. maybe that sounds weird. well, a big aspect of insanity, for me personally, is overthinking. you know, it's like those million reassuring chat posts that fly around tumblr. «other person: hey, nice hair! me: oh god was he being sarcastic?? holy fuck i need to burn it all off», or rather something less caricaturous. you read too much into other people's actions, into news articles, into everything. if you're depressed, like me, you interpret everything to be an exhortation to die, or a personal condemnation.
if you're schizophrenic, or schizotypal, or whatever, you maybe read in a conspiracy. you see cloud lines in the sky and figure it's arnold schwarzenegger's nazi zionist plan.
(by David Dees, who is probably serious)
I mean, maybe. I'm not schizophrenic. I don't know.
But you can't really separate "insane" thinking from "sane" thinking. To survive socially you have to try to figure out the intent behind people's words, it's just that when you do that depressed, you overestimate your own powers of discernment and come to some weird conclusion.
this is all to say that the story here is also about a dude losin his stupid damn mind.
he loses his stupid damn mind to the story. works basically similarly to the political case, see e.g. The Secret of Psalm 46, but with the humorous element that they are books for children.
it's most obviously very similar to Pale Fire, which is, spoiler, about a dude who overanalyzes a boring poem about the atheist idea of death. the major difference, i guess, is that the dude in pale fire seems to have already been nuts, whereas the character in this story is... driven? by the thing.
i think that is what i have to say about that. onto the story. here is the more spoilers.
the reason this resonated with me is that i feel the same way, a lot. i feel special in my insanity, much of the time. like i'm better than those other crazy people because i know about gödel's theorems and freud, or something. i feel objective. this is the kind of feeling the character in the story has. the feeling that they might seem insane to other people, but that they're objectively correct; and then more wormingly the feeling that while they're insane, they're not actually wrong because they know they're insane and can deal with it. maybe. the story didn't actually have a lot of the latter one, maybe. might just be me.
still, objective. insanity is marked in part by speaking in ridiculously scientificesque terminology, like when bad science fiction says "an organism in the kingdom Animalia".
by a nice literary trick this is translated into the objective reality of the story. i like gnosticism too, and there's this whole bit, "as above, so below". wikipedia sums it up very nicely:
Macrocosm and microcosm is an ancient Greek Neo-Platonic schema of seeing the same patterns reproduced in all levels of the cosmos, from the largest scale (macrocosm or universe-level) all the way down to the smallest scale (microcosm or sub-sub-atomic or even metaphysical-level). In the system the midpoint is Man, who summarizes the cosmos.
gnosticism being what happens when you start around plotinus and instead of becoming christianity you go all wiggy. "as above, so below" i've seen attributed to hermes trismestigus, an alchemist/god/whatever mostly remembered for indirectly causing the phrase "hermetic seal".
on this level of things the text makes a nice horror movie. not that there are levels.
so yeah, good.
oh, and the ending was way better than the author's "floornight". very clever, also, psychologically speaking, why i'm not wandering around outside in the cold right now.
EE 102 students! Tired of waiting for your synthesizer to finish routing? Check out this one weird trick to prove P = NP - and more - that the computer programmers down the hall DON’T want you to know!
We’re all used to the computer scientists whining. Oh, this problem is impossible even conceptually. The traveling salesman problem takes more time than there are ways to coat beach sand with all protons in the universe. My job is sooooo hard.
Now you can expose what we always knew were lies! This simple circuit, discovered by a tragically overworked student JUST LIKE YOU, solves the “NP complete” (ridiculous!) Boolean satisfiability problem not just in polynomial time, but INSTANTLY! Simply construct the instance out of gates, insert it into the circuit, and drive the input to logic high. Immediately, you can read off the necessary Boolean inputs below!
The simple construction, already obvious to most of you, relies only on basic principles: that the op amp does “whatever is necessary” to keep its differential input zero! This principle, already known to the designers of op amps, is reflected right in the name. An OPerational amp lets you compute any operation!
Order now and we’ll show you how to solve negated instances JUST AS EASILY!
…
Op amps are an active, nonlinear circuit component that are nonetheless often taught in introductory EE, because they are hella useful (but not this useful). Intro classes are often oriented around passive linear components - resistors, inductors, capacitors, and sometimes transformers - so very idealized models are used.
They were taught to me like this:
an op amp puts a voltage on the output proportional to the difference in voltage of the inputs. The multiplying factor is called “open loop gain”.
the open loop gain of an ideal op amp is infinite.
therefore, to get a finite voltage out, the difference between the inputs must be zero.
So they’re usually used to equate voltages, as in a basic buffer amplifier, or bla bla they’re always used with feedback. E.g., the buffer works by putting the input on one input terminal of the amp, and connecting the amp’s output to the other input; so now the output has to equal the input.
But this is obviously impossible in general, as evidenced by this stupid circuit. It can’t possibly let you invert arbitrary functions, as evidenced by this stupid drawing.
What actually happens, as far as I can discern, is that the amplifier indeed works as an amp, but before it can reach “infinite output” it passes through every voltage in between, which (if the feedback is set up correctly) includes the output that drives the feedback input appropriately.
“If the feedback is set up correctly” implies that the correct output is actually there. In this circuit, the logic high input (positive) is inverted and compared to the initially zero feedback input, so the amp output is driven ever more negative, which of course doesn’t solve a Boolean circuit.
i've now read about two space missions (EJSM/Laplace and the giant space laser triangle) that were originally proposed as NASA/ESA joint missions, but NASA dropped out for lack of budget
i'm not very gung ho on space compared to a lot of nerds but this sort of thing still makes me sad. these sort of things are great. pretty much just totally useless science. knowing gravitational waves exist or the composition of gandymede's crust isn't going to help anyone in the forseeable future. it's just kind of nice to know.
it's not even a "moonshot" since going to the moon was a fuck-you to the USSR with science tacked on, whereas nobody is politically going to care about the space laser triangle.
private space exploration is coming up in the US, but it's not going to be exploration, it's asteroid mining and cheap launch vehicles and that's all well and good but i don't think virgin galactic is going to fund boring into makemake.
so, yknow the thing in time travel stories where a message or an idea ends up being the reason for its own creation?
like, character finds some instructions as to how to build a time machine in weird great grandparent’s notebook and then they go back in time and (usually accidentally) give those instructions to the grandparent when he was a kid (or somesuch)
or, somebody plays a song which is accidentally heard by the person who composed that song in the first place, who then copies it
and every time there’s this feeling right that something’s not quite right because the thing has no “origin”; who invented the time machine? who composed the song?
well I want a story where that’s the monster; an actual conscious being that creates time loops. also that’s the only way that they can affect the world. they have no physical body. AND i want it to be one of those stories where it starts out with a scary conspiracy vibe but by the end somebody ends up romancing the monster. somehow.
(and then I want another story where there are several such characters, and they are in a roiling political conflict. it will be very confusing.)
1. Wow! 2. This is so elegant. I don't really understand but it's beautiful. The whole universe must be based on these principles. 3. Ugh, but the [construction] people actually use is so ugly. Why not just use beauty? 4. Beauty is hard to maintain. 5. I abhor these hacks, but I have to admire their cleverness. 6. Maybe hacks aren't so different from beauty. 7. Everything is built on hacks. 8. Well, whatever, it works. 9. Usually. Possibly there are more stages. I'm on 9 for software, 8.5 for physiology, 3 for hardware.
Has anyone gone through and characterized the quotient of drums under the "sounds the same" equivalence class? Because the example ambiguous drums I remember are pretty fucking weird looking to begin with. I'd look at that shit and I'd be like, shit, I don't care, same damn drum.
I have to stop myself from thinking about how many aspects of technology I don’t understand … Like speakers. Speakers put sound out … so they can’t take sound in?”
http://nytimes.com/2015/06/28/opinion/sunday/face-it-your-brain-is-a-computer.html I complain about brains being considered computers a lot, and I don't think this article is very convincing on that front. But the somewhat tangential comparison to FPGAs is interesting. Turing machines, or rather universal Turing machines, are programmable, but they're essentially oriented towards an input being turned into an output; that is to say, a process that continually takes inputs and continually outputs has to be somewhat massaged into the formalism. (Practically speaking, this means interrupts and stuff. Not great.) Brains, obviously, continually input and output. Now an FPGA is a more obscure thing. You don't get them at Best Buy. What an fpga is is sort of to a regular electronic circuit (synchronous digital integrated circuits, more specifically) as a universal Turing machine is to Turing machines in general. They are "Field Programmable", see. Abstractly, the obvious structure for this general circuit is a lookup table ("LUT") for logic (as a LUT can do arbitrary Boolean functions), along with a flip flop for time dependence/memory. This is actually formalized as a "Moore" or "Mealy" machine depending on details of the connections, and assuming only one clock. Early FPGAs, or CPLDs or whatever, actually resembled this structure -networks of LUTs and FFs. But FPGAs are more complicated now, cos people want to use them for specialized tasks. They have specialized blocks, like multipliers, clock managers, and a LOT of shit for I/O. I used to think of neurons similarly to the old CLPDs. Neurons are universal, sure, so just hook up a fuckload together and bam. Why bother with structure? But of course it's not really like that. You have ganglia, you have specialized cell types. Superficial
B.B. Fulton (1932)1 was the first to use cricket songs extensively in distinguishing species, and he found numerous instances of supposed species producing more than one calling song. For example, he recognized four songs of "Gryllus assimilis" in North Carolina and showed that populations producing the four songs had different seasonal life cycles, occurred in different (though overlapping) habitats, and were reproductively incompatible in laboratory crosses (Fulton 1952). Subsequent studies of "G. assimilis" in the eastern United States proved the existence of at least eight cryptic species - including two that have indistinguishable songs but are seasonally separated (Alexander and Bigelow 1960) and one that has no calling song (Walker 1974). (The latter two cases illustrate that acoustic studies do not identify all sibling species of crickets.) Once the species of Gryllus in the eastern United States were recognized on the basis of song or life cycle, most proved identifiable by conventional morphological features or by the number and spacing of teeth in the stridulatory file (Alexander 1957; Alexander and Walker 1962, Nickle and Walker 1974). The species had not been distinguished in earlier studies of museum specimens because distinguishing species within a group of specimens containing na unknown number of species is far more difficult than finding differences between groups of specimens already known to represent species. A similar series of events occurred with "Teleogryllus mitratus," which are Gryllus-like Japanese field crickets. Differences in calling songs led Ohmachi and Matsuura (1951)2 to distinguish three species that subsequently proved different in color pattern, ovipositor length, and karyotype.
Modern recording and analyzing devices have made it much easier to study cricket calls, and sibling species have been recognized by song in practically every group of crickets in which the acoustics have been studied - for example, field crickets in Australia (Leroy 1965)3, field crickets in Japan (Matsuura 1977, 1978a, 1978b)4, mole crickets in France (Bennet-Clark 1970a), and ground crickets and scaly crickets in the United States (Alexander and Thomas 1959, Love and Walker 19795).
Sibling species seem unusually numerous in crickets, but they may be no frequent than in other insects - just easier to detect (Walker 1964b)6. As Henry (1985) proposed, acoustic signaling to form sexual pairs may be conductive to speciation because once populations diverge in calling song they can remain reproductively isolated even if, in other respects, they are remarkably similar. However, the fact that some sibling species of crickets lack distinctive songs and have been recognized through studies of life cycles or allozymes strengthens the notion that sibling cricket species would be frequent even if crickets were mute (e.g., Alexander and Bigelow 1960, Howard 1983, Masaki 1983).
(From TJ Walker and Sinzo Masaki, "Natural History", in Cricket Behavior and Neurobiology (Huber, Moore, Loher eds.). Many of the papers cited are available on Walker's website.)
Fulton, B. B. North Carolina's Singing Orthoptera. Journal of the Elisha Mitchell Scientific Society 47:55-69. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/jncas/id/1546/rec/1 ↩︎
Ohmachi, F., and I. Matsuura. 1951. On the Japanese large field cricket and its allied species. Bulletin of the Faculty of Agriculture, Mie University 2:63-72. [In Japanese with English summary.] ↩︎
Leroy, Y. 1965. Exemple d'espèces cryptiques distinguées par leurs émissions acoustiques (Teleogryllus commodus Walk., Teleogryllus oceanicus Le Guillou, Gryllinae, Orthoptères, Ensifères). Comptes rendus de l'Académie des sciences 260:5343-5346. ↩︎
Parts two and three (maybe? There's 1977a and 1977b but not 1977), four, and five (1978 is divided totally into 1978a and 1978b, making the previous parenthetical weird) of Matsuura, I. 1976-1982. Japanese crickets. Kontyu to Shizen 13(2):17-22. [In Japanese.] ↩︎
Love, R.E., and Walker, T.J. 1979. Sysematics and acoustical (sic) behavior of scaly crickets (Orthoptera: Gryllidae: Mogoplistinae) of eastern United States. Transactions of the American Entomological Society (Phila.) 105:1-66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25078233 ↩︎
Walker, T.J. 1964. Cryptic species among sound-producing ensiferan Orthoptera (Gryllidae and Tettigoniidae). Quarterly Review of Biology 39:345-355. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2818211 ↩︎
I was watching a movie, or in a movie. Simulations of things are indistinguishable from things, you see.
It was a Breakfast Club kind of movie, directed by David Lynch. When I say "Breakfast Club", I mean, since I haven't actually seen that film and may be mischaracterizing it, that it mostly consisted of people sitting around and talking.
The movie started with a character roster with actors' names, like a TV show; there was me, a friend of mine (played by David Lynch, because he sometimes acts in his own movies), two sapient buildings, and several miscellaneous characters in their twenties and below. One of these characters was a witch in training, and the movie took place almost entirely in her school. The school building was one of the sapient buildings, and had a name like "Ms. [G something]'s Metaphors and Castles Presents Darkstar", the implication being that the school had been intended to be a metaphor but they messed up and provided a castle instead.
I don't think either of the buildings had any lines, anyway.
The whole movie was about romance. We'd express what we wanted out of relationships and ask for advice on making them happen, or someone would ask for advice on a relationship they already had, etc.
Near the end of the film - let's say the last twenty minutes - I expressed my desire to kill myself and everybody in the room. This was nominally because I am aromantic. This desire was presented in the same way as the earlier desires, and responded to in the same way (i.e. with calm reason). My friend, played by David Lynch, suggested enacting a blood ritual, so we tried that.
We got a large number of dolls of babies from somewhere, and hacked them up with axes and knives, to form a pile of diced dolls. Then we started ritually murdering the younger and weaker members of our group.
For example, we took this fourteen year old kid, who for some reason I remember was hispanic, and threw him in a fireplace and watched him burn down to the skeleton (which is pretty unrealistic, fireplaces aren't that hot). The fireplace was underneath the television stand, and somebody complained that his death throes were making the movie hard to watch, and I told them to just deal with it.
This all caused a hellmouth to open in the room, a large hole in the floor leading to hell. My friend said that hey it worked and jumped in, and then everybody else was either sucked in or jumped in themselves. Fin.
The next morning I had a burrito for breakfast, in the same room the hellmouth had been opened in in the movie. Actually three burritos. They were stored on hooks near the door, and had been like that all night, so they kind of crumbled.
My witch friend complained about the abrupt ending to the movie, and I said that all Lynch movies were like that, killing everybody unexpectedly in the last few minutes. My Lynch friend confirmed this for her while I chewed.
My witch friend said that the characters in the film should have done more to stop the Lynch friend character. I said that in the movie I'd changed my mind as the ritual was enacted, and tried to stop the Lynch friend, and failed. The Lynch friend said that while he was a fan of Lynch's movies, he hadn't seen this particular one for months, so he didn't remember enough about that part to be specific.
getting trashed is fun but how about something else
Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, by William Hinton, is good propaganda. "good" both in the sense that it is effective as propaganda, being entertaining and educational about false things, and "good" that it's a good book, entertaining and educational about true things.
It's about the Communist revolution of the 1940s in China as concerns a single village, Long Bow (张庄村, Zhāngzhuāngcūn) in the norethern part of the country. It's not so much a regular history text as it is a "documentary", as explained by the book itself; individual people are very important, they're sometimes interviewed separately, that sort of thing. It really does read like a documentary film watches, which is not something I think I've seen before.
I've tried to write out a rundown of the book four times. I don't think it's happening. So: If you want a book on the practical consequences of a Communist policy in the small scale, with numbers and charts - in China at this time specifically, or in feudal societies, or whatever - this is a good pick. Or if you like seeing the concrete policy statements of Communists, which are mysteriously hard to find in my American upbringing.
Absolute equalitarianism is basically wrong. [...] Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman mao Tse-tung all oppose absolute equalitarianism. [...] In light of these facts, our point of view towards fanshen and the abolition of feudalism has not been correct. Our goal is to abolish the system, to do away with the landlords as a class. We oppose the feudal system primarily because it hinders production.
