lancelot ontology @verasimile - Tumblr Blog

all men are violent pedophiles and all women are frail idiots

Wiktionary is temporarily down and it's embarrassing how debilitating this is. Every other online dictionary is terrible

official-kircheis

jisho.org

oed.com

wiktionary is terrible

discoursedrome

OED is pretty bad now; in addition to being paywalled at an extortionate rate, it would rarely be worth using if it were free. It's still a titanic accomplishment, of course, and they still do unequalled legwork, but most of their best work is in the past and has already been incorporated into competitors like Wiktionary, which are better-implemented and less hostile to their users. I have a shorter OED I pull off the shelf in a pinch, but it's heavy, and they've gone out of their way to stop selling respectable digital versions in order to speed their own obsolescence.

I'd never heard of jisho.org, but it's apparently a Japanese-English dictionary? I don't know anything about that, it may be good; there are a couple other dictionaries I like for narrow purposes. Wiktionary, by contrast, does everything in a no-nonsense way, and makes it incredibly easy to do cross-linguistic work. It is sometimes sketchy, so it's seldom my last recourse, but nothing else could ever be my first. I've looked hard!

Anyway, it's back, so off to the word mines.

official-kircheis

the OED’s website redesign is a crime against humanity, of course.

wiktionary’s choice of medium and software is just insanely poorly suited to a dictionary. mediawiki is built for freeform unstructured content, a dictionary is highly structured.

I see now that they’ve changed the layout so that English is on top on the English site and the navigation is in a sidebar instead of above the content. before you’d have to scroll past the table of contents and Afrikaans and Belarusian and so on before getting to English words

I still find wiktionary terrible for translation. compare finding out what the Japanese word for "cat" is using wiktionary vs. using jisho.

wiktionary’s problem is it’s using markup to do the job of an RDBMS which is like solving differential equations in microsoft powerpoint. it’s very impressive that you can do what you can do that way, but it’s just not pleasant for anyone.

discoursedrome

This much is true, they've recently changed the UX to something that was obviously designed for articles with no thought given to Wiktionary, where no one wants to read more than a small fraction of the page and sidebar navigation is essential. Still, Wiktionary has far more powerful search features than any other major online dictionary -- show me how to do a regular expression search of only nouns using OED! -- and is incredibly useful as a starting point for comparative translations and etymologies, even though you usually want to check the results somewhere else once you have them.

You're not wrong that a lot of the translations are sketchy -- this works best if you're translating between two languages that both have good Wiktionary versions, so you can hop between them and compare, a process which is seamless there and impossible in most other contexts. I actually prefer this to a true cross-linguistic dictionary, because the data points are less correlated: the person who added an Italian translation in English Wikipedia is hardly ever the same one who put the corresponding English translation into Italian Wikipedia, so you get a broader survey.

English Wikipedia in particular also has fantastic inflection tables for a million languages, and the IPA translations and crosslinks to related words and derived phrases are hugely valuable. Wiktionary is the only dictionary which puts so much information at your disposal while making it so easy to navigate, and that philosophy makes up for all its other deficiencies.

#wiktionary my beloved

weaponwifer

weepingwidar

Agata Kus (Polish, 1987) - Blue Sun (2020)

#aesthetic

talonabraxas

“Our Wish for the End, Me” by Clayshaper

#arcadia

tanadrin

Bacteria do have souls, but binary fission doesn’t produce new souls 99% of the time, so most single celled organisms share these sprawling souls that just get bigger every time they divide. Over time they compact down into these big mats of soul get compacted into geological layers that gradually accrete to the world soul. Sexual reproduction creates new souls but they’re much shorter lived as a result, and rarely make it into the bedrock, so most of the world spirit is from the Proterozoic.

dragon-in-a-fez

but do viruses have souls?

tanadrin

No. Some people think that this is because viruses have no metabolism and can’t reproduce on their own, and therefore do not qualify as life. In fact it is just because they are too small. Pneumatons, the constituent particle of soul, have a wavelength of about 1 micrometer, and so can’t be contained in cell membranes or protein envelopes smaller than that. This also means the smallest bacteria also don’t have souls. This includes mitochondria and their immediate ancestors, which was a major impetus for their symbiosis with eukaryotes in the first place. The eukaryote cell got a source of energy, and in return the mitochondria finally got to directly apprehend a portion of divine eternity.

dragon-in-a-fez

this is super useful information, thank you!

m1sosazai

@tiktaaliker

0ctogus

OH I LOVE THIS

Raises so many interesting questions too!

Are there any organisms with soul ploidy > 1? I racked my brain but all the syncytial organisms like slimemolds generally originate from asexual reproduction rather than many organisms coming together and dissolving their membranes.

Hypothetically for a myxomycete slime mold, if you managed to get two haploid cells to fuse right after germinating from a spore (soul each since those spores are sexual) then you could originate a plasmodium with two souls by my count! But that's as far as i could get, and haploid slime mold cells generally do undergo some rounds of mitotic division before fusing.

If you count microbiota as part of a holobiont, how many souls does the average multicellular organism have? Or do we share a soul? That'd be cool too.

No virus goes over 1μm, even the giant amoeba ones, i checked :(. If you consider like some do that some bacteriophages that integrate their genome into their hosts aren't reaaaaally that much like typical viruses but rather more part of the bacterial pangenome as a mobile genetic element, then some viruses do get a touch of divinity. Also applies to human retroviruses.

Do dikaryotic fungi have two kinds of soul in the portion of their mycelia which has two nuclei?

‌Chloroplasts are more than 1μm large, do they have a soul? what led the cyanobacteria to associate with the archeplastid ancestor?

(i love the name pneumaton btw, great link to the original meaning of anima in latin)

fascinating questions in animobiology

itsaboringname

There's also the question of what exactly the 1μm width pertains to.. I'm drawn to an analog of the standard model, a sort of pneumatonic(?) uncertainty principle but for living beings. So depending on how the soul is viewed it appears as an ethereal soul or a physical body, and it's position and it's movement can never be known at the same time. I don't know but maybe that impacts the exact measurements? More research is required.

tanadrin

as i mentioned in the tags on the second post, pneumatons are composed of elementary particles called sophons, which are like bosons if they had feelings. sophons are the class of particle that obey Descartes-Chalmers statistics and have quantum numbers associated with various qualia.

i should elaborate: you remember how in the bohr model of the atom where electron shells can only exist where a whole number of electron wavelengths fit into an orbit (because otherwise destructive interference occurs)? it's a situation kind of analogous to that. pneumatons in their ground state have a wavelength of about 1 micron and so can't exist in smaller organisms. they can have a shorter wavelength if they have a higher energy, but then they can decay into other bound sophon states, like psions, animons, cognitons, or even pure inspirons (high-energy, low-mass particles a bit like neutrinos, that preferentially only interact with brains when they're bored and don't have a bit of paper handy to actually write stuff down on). otherwise their mass is too low to really decay into anything else, which is what allows pneumatons to be stable inside protein-based tissue.

long range structure of souls is built up by the exchange of psychons, the force-carrying particle of telepathy, prophecy, daydreams, and weird higher math that doesn't correspond to anything useful. in the late 19th and early 20th century it was hoped that the psychon could give us direct access to the realm of platonic forms, until Saussure's experiments in applied semiotics killed platonism dead in 1903. efforts to unify fundamental metaphysics moved on to antisymmetric Deleuze-Guattari theory in the 1960s.

nonetheless little progress has been made since. despite spending billions smashing phone psychics and mathematics grad students together in huge particle accelerators, no differenceons have been detected, and post-structuralists' predictions that sophons are fundamentally unstable have not been born out. experimental metaphysicians keep asking for more money and theoretical metaphysicians keep trying to come up with new ways of unifying the soul, consciousness, and religious experience, but frankly the field is in kind of a rut. even the most optimistic predictions suggest that we'd need a couple of religious kooks on the order of John Murray Spear to probe the lowest grand unification energies, and the world just doesn't seem capable of producing people with that kind of frenetic vision anymore. the best we can do is occasionally kidnapping Claude Vorilhon and bombarding him with x rays, and while that's good for like an undergrad demonstration of sophon tracks in a cloud chamber, we're not gonna get new metaphysics out of it.

#arcadia

formlab

Harman Kardon Citation 18 Brochure, 1977

#aesthetic

ionomycin

temple at the end of the road

#aesthetic

sauzzart

“The beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite”

#aesthetic

elierlick

They know exactly what they're doing.

fierceawakening

Good lord. I usually don’t go in for the conspiratorial but that’s. That is um.

Yikes.

liskantope

I'm probably going to regret sticking my nose into this, but.

This is yet another example that I see so often (particularly on this topic) of a failure of Theory of Mind and failure to approach a problem by adopting a conditional from the opposite end of it.

I mean, sure, it comes across as kind of lame and awkward and cheap just to leave a bunch of links to mental health organizations (by the way I haven't looked up the linked organizations but some of them seem to be for treating mental health issues in general as opposed to suicide hotlines) as a sort of compensation for saying "sorry, we're going to deny you the thing a lot of you are desperately asking for". But.

Suppose -- just suppose -- that the UK people in support of restricting gender medicine sincerely believe something like "Claimed gender dysphoria is usually a form of mental illness where the child/teenager is confused about what's the matter and wrong in thinking that the only way to feel better is this form of medical treatment, when actually most of the time there's a better way to treat their mental health which doesn't have serious physical consequences."

(This first step already seems to be one that almost nobody ever seems willing or able to arrive at unless they're already on the other side of this issue. That is, acknowledging that a whole lot of people believe the thing I described in the paragraph above rather than "Ugh, trans teenagers are gross, so let's get rid of them by restricting their access to gender medicine so that they'll do the work for us", as kind-of-implied in the OP and so many other places.)

Now given the above hypothetical, and given that those people's favored solution is banning certain treatments (as harmful or hurtful as that may be), what should they add in support of trans youth? Like, what would you have preferred?

If their model of the situation is that a bunch of young people have a certain mental illness and are mistaken in thinking it should be dealt with by physical treatment, well, wouldn't it make sense that the way to support them is by directly treating their mental illness? Which is what mental illness hotlines are for (particularly one that seems specialized for dealing with "gender confusion" -- yes, it's probably an organization based on the "so-called transness is mostly just a mental illness" ideological belief)?

And with regard to half of them being suicide hotlines, well, that would seem to be a reasonable choice given that one of the main refrains of the groups of people clamoring for easier access to gender medicine for teenagers is that without it they might kill themselves, which no decent person would want. I mean, I suppose they could choose not to link to suicide hotlines and risk that children/teenagers denied puberty blockers might hurt themselves on the belief (correct or not) that it's the only way out of their pain. Would that be better?

I'm generally quite opposed to laws coming from governments that ban medical procedures that a ton of people would choose to get and desperately want, particularly in the case of puberty blockers (as they seem at least in theory to delay having to make a decision without permanent consequences of their own), but we're never going to figure this out as a society if one side insists on being convinced that the other is simply out to kill (or fine with killing) the affected set of people.

verasimile

my intuition about the puberty blocker bans is that the people who vote in favor of these measures largely have the stance you describe, but that the people who advocate for them (very small subset of the former group) are much more fine with some downstream effects of their actions being deaths of people they have some amount of distaste for. (many of) the pundits and politicians that drive the anti-trans movement are very clearly hateful. these policies are put forward by bigots and voted for by--well, still bigots, as far as that term goes, but certainly less ideologically bigoted and more incidentally so

early 20th century mobster voice "hold on, plato was a broad?"