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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • There seems to be a bit of a difference, even though both involve asking questions. To quote wiktionary:

    sealioning (uncountable)
    A type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity (“I’m just trying to have a debate”), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter, in order to wear down an opponent and incite angry responses that will discredit them.

    Apparently coined by this webcomic:

    https://wondermark.com/c/1k62/

    JAQ off (third-person singular simple present JAQs off, present participle JAQing off, simple past and past participle JAQed off) (slang, derogatory) To ask loaded questions inviting someone to justify their views or behaviours, in an attempt to make tangential claims of little verisimilitude appear acceptable.

    So the way I understand it, “JAQing off” is when you’re trying to guide your audience towards a certain conclusion without stating it outright (e.g. “Are the official numbers of holocaust victims really as solid as people claim? Are there alternative historical interpretations? I’m just asking questions here, not implying anything folks.” when you think just saying “The holocaust didn’t happen!” might make it too obvious you’re a Nazi), while sealioning is more about annoying the other party and trying to make them look bad/unreasonable and yourself polite and reasonable in comparison (e.g. “I’m just curious, is there any actual evidence that fascists are inherently bad people, as you claim? As a person with no opinion on the matter, I would just like to have an honest and open debate on this subject.” so when people reply with something like “Fuck off, fascist!” you can say “Wow, so much for the tolerant left.”). Both tactics are frequently applied by online trolls, especially of the far right, but they have somewhat different goals.



  • 4ce@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mljackpot
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    1 year ago

    That takes something from being completely unreasonable to be understandable.

    Why would taxing a gross income of above a billion US$ by ~66% be “completely unreasonable”? Imo taxes for such incomes should generally be higher if anything.




  • In physics, however, using Latex is absolutely the norm, and on the arxiv it’s also absolutely the norm. That they aren’t using it shows at the very least that they’re out of touch with academic practice. I mean, if their extraordinary claim is true it would be one of the most significant discoveries of the century and pretty much a guaranteed Nobel prize. Therefore you might think they would put at least some amount of effort into presenting their results, such as producing nice looking plots, and, well, using Latex like a normal working physicist. The fact that they don’t doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, but it doesn’t exactly increase their credibility either.

    PS: I also just noticed that one of their equations (p. 9 in 2307.12008) literally contains the expression “F(00l)”. Again, maybe they’re just oblivious and didn’t realize that could look like they’re calling us fools, but the extraordinary claims together with the rather unorthodox and low-effort presentation make me very skeptical.


  • I don’t think anything the author actually said in the article is too far removed from the current mindset of the average physicist. In fact, as far as I can tell none of the statements the author makes are particularly controversial, although I do find the title a bit click-baity, and the “animal” analogy a bit unwieldy. But if you insist on only listening to people who have made a “revolutionary breakthrough”, feel free to read the article by Nobel laureate Phillip W Anderson that the author cites as support (and which makes a similar, although perhaps not identical point in a better way imo).


  • A big paper with only three authors?!

    That part isn’t so unusual, especially in condensed matter, where labs can be relatively small. For example, the paper announcing the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in 1986 only had two authors (Bednorz & Müller).

    I went down the rabbit hole of trying to find the lab from which it has been published.

    For those who didn’t look into the paper: They seem to work for a company called “Quantum Energy Research Centre, Inc.”, which does sound a bit… woo-y to me. At least the third author seems to work at Korea University, which, according to Wikipedia, is relatively prestigious. Who knows, maybe the authors just can’t be bothered to use Latex and didn’t choose the name of the company or didn’t put too much thought into it, but for the moment I’m also rather skeptical.



  • Yeah that’s what woke is. It’s believing what Americans have always said about our country and demanding it do that.

    I’m afraid that the word has long since transcended the borders of your country. In fact it has even transcended the English language and found its way into the language of right-wing culture warriors all over the world.

    Also, while I think I know what you’re trying to say, “traditional American values like the idea that all people are created equal” sounds a bit funny considering that your country expressly allowed slavery upon its foundation.





  • 4ce@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlThe only political map I need
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    1 year ago

    As a non colorblind person, I would like to understand how this image could have been modified to include our colorblind brethren.

    In general it is a good idea to use colour gradients that monotonically increase (or decrease) in brightness in addition to (or instead of) hue (see here for an in-depth comparison of different colour maps. It’s from a Python package, but it shows some interesting plots comparing different colour maps when it comes to brightness vs. hue). This isn’t just useful for colour blind people, but also helpful when printing in black-and-white.

    If you absolutely have to use a diverging colour map, you might reach most people by using blue as a major component of one, but only one of the two branches (the map in the OP uses blue as a major component of both branches, which is why red/green colour blind people can have a problem with it). That way most colour blind people should be able to distinguish the branches, since blue colour blindness (Tritanopia/Tritanomaly) is much rarer than red (Protanopia/Protanomaly) or green (Deuteranopia/Deuteranomaly) colour blindness.

    Apart from that it is also possible to mark information visually in other ways than by colour, e.g. by shapes and patterns, like dotted or dashed lines for line graphs, shaded or dotted areas for bar and area graphs, or different geometric shapes like crosses, diamonds, and circles when plotting individual data points, but that is probably more useful when different sets of data are plotted in the same graph.




  • 4ce@lemm.eetoNews@lemmy.worldThe temperature in China hit 52.2°C (126°F)
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    1 year ago

    Not sure if this will give you hope or not, but one thing to consider is that we could still make it far worse, or put differently, that it’s still in our power to stop that from happening. We can’t change the fact that climate change already has noticeable negative consequences today, nor that global temperatures will rise by at least 1.5° towards the end of the century (compared to 1950-1980), probably more. But we do have a somewhat realistic chance of keeping it at around 2° or below (see e.g. here or here for easy simulations in your browser). The point is that every tenth of a degree counts, and our action or lack thereof now might well make the difference between it “just” getting bad with regular droughts, crop failures, some regions becoming temporarily uninhabitable due to wet bulb temperatures and so on on the one hand, or all of that on a much larger scale leading to societal collapse if we don’t act at all. We live in the worst extinction event the earth has seen since the asteroid that killed the non-bird dinosaurs, but we can still keep it at that instead of turning it into the worst extinction event the earth has ever seen. Luckily, governments (and industry) largely have at least accepted that climate change is a thing, and in Europe and the Americas green-house gas emission have actually already been sinking for the last 15 years or so. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not great, and these governments still should do much more, but it could also be worse, and the fact that we’re lowering emissions despite our politicians generally being very friendly with industry could give at least a sliver of hope. The emissions of China and India (and the rest of Asia) are still rising, but show signs of decelerated growth at least, and in Africa emissions are still fairly low and rising rather slowly, with a chance that some less developed countries might more or less just skip a big chunk of carbon-based industrialisation in favour of renewables. Altogether this means that we’re already on a way to avoid the worst possible scenarios, and still have the power to keep it towards the lower end of the scale as far as terrible outcomes are concerned.

    In addition, while individuals have always less power than whole governments or industries, there are nevertheless things anyone reading this could do, e.g.:

    • Voting for parties that favour stronger climate action, and perhaps even more importantly, not supporting those who do less or even nothing. You can also protest or try to influence your government in some other ways.
    • Reduce your personal impact by not consuming animal products (in particular meat and dairy), not flying if you can avoid it, not buying stuff you don’t really need, and not having (more) kids. Edit: Also try to favour public transport over driving your own car, and if you need a car, try to use a small, electrical one to reduce emissions.
    • Tell other people you know who might listen to do those things. Many people favour climate action in principle, but are too lazy, scared or just otherwise preoccupied to actually start doing stuff on their own. You kicking them in the butt or leading by example can motivate them and in turn other people they might now.

    If you’re reading this and whether or not you’re already doing some of those things, I’m sure you can find at least some things you could do (I know I can, and I’m trying to put it into practice), which might in turn also make you feel less depressed about the situation. As mentioned before, I’m not saying that we’re in a great situation, but whining about it helps nobody, and we’re still in a situation where we have the power to stop things from getting even worse.


  • Not sure if this will give you hope or not, but one thing to consider is that we could still make it far worse, or put differently, that it’s still in our power to stop that from happening. We can’t change the fact that climate change already has noticeable negative consequences today, nor that global temperatures will rise by at least 1.5° towards the end of the century (compared to 1950-1980), probably more. But we do have a somewhat realistic chance of keeping it at around 2° or below (see e.g. here or here for easy simulations in your browser). The point is that every tenth of a degree counts, and our action or lack thereof now might well make the difference between it “just” getting bad with regular droughts, crop failures, some regions becoming temporarily uninhabitable due to wet bulb temperatures and so on on the one hand, or all of that at a much larger scale leading to societal collapse if we don’t act at all. We live in the worst extinction event the earth has seen since the asteroid that killed the non-bird dinosaurs, but we can still keep it at that instead of turning it into the worst extinction event the earth has ever seen. Luckily, governments (and industry) largely have at least accepted that climate change is a thing, and in Europe and the Americas green-house gas emission have actually already been sinking for the last 15 years or so. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not great, and these governments still should do much more, but it could also be worse, and the fact that we’re lowering emissions despite our politicians generally being very friendly with industry could give at least a sliver of hope. The emissions of China and India (and the rest of Asia) are still rising, but show signs of decelerated growth at least, and in Africa emissions are still fairly low and rising rather slowly, with a chance that some less developed countries might more or less just skip a big chunk of carbon-based industrialisation in favour of renewables. Altogether this means that we’re already on a way to avoid the worst possible scenarios, and still have the power to keep it towards the lower end of the scale as far as terrible outcomes are concerned.

    In addition, while individuals have always less power than whole governments or industries, there are nevertheless things anyone reading this could do, e.g.:

    • Voting for parties that favour stronger climate action, and perhaps even more importantly, not supporting those who do less or even nothing. You can also protest or try to influence your government in some other ways.
    • Reduce your personal impact by not consuming animal products (in particular meat and dairy), not flying if you can avoid it, not buying stuff you don’t really need, and not having (more) kids.
    • Tell other people you know who might listen to do those things. Many people favour climate action in principle, but are too lazy, scared or just otherwise preoccupied to actually start doing stuff on their own. You kicking them in the butt or leading by example can motivate them and in turn other people they might now.

    If you’re reading this and whether or not you’re already doing some of those things, I’m sure you can find at least some things you could do (I know I can, and I’m trying to put it into practice), which might in turn also make you feel less depressed about the situation. As mentioned before, I’m not saying that we’re in a great situation, but whining about it helps nobody, and we’re still in a situation where we have the power to stop things from getting even worse.


  • It’s from a longer quote in “A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages” about the language Haskell:

    1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional language. Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem?”

    Some other languages like e.g. Rust also use monads. The point I was trying to make humorously was that many programming languages sometimes do use math concepts, sometimes even very abstract maths (like monads), and while it’s not maths per se, programming and computer science in general can have quite a bit to do with maths sometimes.