Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

I signed a thousand books today. Almost all of them were ones I wrote!

Jamais vu, a kind of opposite of déjà vu, is when something familiar loses its usual meaning and starts seeming strange.

You can bring on jamais vu by staring at a word. For example, psychologists told people to look at the word 'blood' for 3 minutes. Some reports:

24 seconds: “… b and d look like each other turned backwards, hence meaningless.”
60 seconds: “o's look unfamiliar, staring.”
72 seconds: “b and d look like p and q upside down.”
179 seconds: “a collection of letters”.

Has this happened to you? It happens to me quite easily.

It's also been found that repeatedly checking something can eventually lower your confidence in what you're checking. Like if you check to see if a stove is off, say, 20 times in a row.

Some psychologists call this 'semantic satiation', which hints at a beginning of a theory for what's going on. But there's been much less study of jamais vu than déjà vu, so little is known about it.

The paper I'm reading has a cute title: "The the the the induction of jamais vu in the laboratory: word alienation and semantic satiation." You can read it for free here:

https://hal.science/hal-03257557/

Three mathematicians I've met with recently, who have three ways of thinking about math:

1. The first mathematician likes to work primarily in terms of analogies, gaining a broad perspective and then carrying results and ideas from one area to another. He would like tools that help with these analogies.

2. The second mathematician doesn't understand why anyone would want tools that do it. He likes to build results from scratch, from the very foundations up, even rediscovering the already discovered before getting to his own new results. He would like tools that help with this building process.

3. The third mathematician likes to take problems from one area and attack them with approaches from another area. I don't know what tools he wants yet, but it feels like an in-between space of (1) and (2), like going as deep as possible into a single analogy.

Very interesting summary presented by Maria: the situation seems to be worse for women in Mathematics compared to All Sciences…

Mathematician Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck was born #OTD in 1942.

She is known for her work on PDEs, calculus of variations, topology, and gauge theory, and was the second woman (after Emmy Noether!) to give the plenary lecture to the International Congress of Mathematicians.

Has anyone (other than me) proposed making bottom-posting the default when quote-boosts are implemented?

Bottom-posting is IMO the difference between "hey look at this" culture and "yes, and..." culture. It's a small difference, but I think it frames conversations in a very different way.

I find it fascinating that the sorts of intellectual elites who used to talk about how terrible Facebook is for democracy over content moderation policies and how they’d never use it again are on Twitter/X day in & day out where far more deplorable things happen every day.

https://theconnector.substack.com/p/finishing-with-twitterx

The #fediverse is international, but there may are continents with more users. Let’s proof that!

Which continent are you living on?
#poll #earth

TIL that Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, typed 313 books word for word to distribute them online free of cost. Today, the project has over 70.000 free eBooks.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/13/michael-hart-obituary
#til #todayilearned
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/16iqcw1/til_that_michael_hart_the_founder_of_project/

"As of now, 15 September 2023, the comic book property called Fables, including all related Fables spin-offs and characters, is now in the public domain. What was once wholly owned by Bill Willingham is now owned by everyone, for all time. It’s done, and as most experts will tell you, once done it cannot be undone. Take-backs are neither contemplated nor possible."

https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/willingham-sends-fables-into-the

Largely forgotten until now, between 1933 and 1945 hundreds and hundreds of Jewish women and men performed individual acts of resistance in Nazi Germany.

Jews of all ages destroyed Nazi symbols, protested in public, disobeyed Nazi laws and defended themselves against insults and physical attacks.

Pictured: Lizi Rosenfeld, a Jewish woman, sits on a park bench bearing a sign that reads, ‘Only for Aryans,’ in August 1938 in Vienna ⬇️

https://theconversation.com/how-individual-ordinary-jews-fought-nazi-persecution-a-new-view-of-history-210337
#history #histodons #protest

we are posting this from the apple iic and we are way too excited about it

Here’s a survey for evolutionary biologists with non-academic careers:
https://liverpool.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/non-academic-careers-survey
For exploring career options outside of the "standard" academic track...
Survey by Andrea Betancourt / University of Liverpool

“British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world, with 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide, hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals. It’s here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint” in the early aughts.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook

Via @ajsadauskas

#BP #ClimateChange

I am so, so, SO done with Twitter.

https://badastronomy.substack.com/p/goodbye-twitter

@TOrynski I've paid a significant price for leaving Twitter, because I'm no longer in the conversation the others in my peer group continue to have there. Whatever visibility Twitter gave me is gone.

Upside: With fewer than half the followers I had at Twitter, the genuine engagement I have here is at least 10x what it was on Musk's site.

I was a huge fan of Twitter, and hated to leave. But I had to leave. @mastodonmigration @msifry

"Media Matters ran a test of X’s system for reporting policy violations by flagging 28 posts that specifically claimed that 'Hitler was right' or a 'final solution' is needed for Jewish people. X’s reporting system responded in five instances by telling us those don’t violate the platform’s policies." https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/x-repeatedly-told-us-users-who-posted-hitler-was-right-and-urged-final-solution-jewish #Twitter

So I can't talk too much about what's IN the book yet, because that's how publishing works, but like... there is now every single day an article that is basically wrong, or treating a question as mysterious when there are actual answers, about space settlement. Please consider reading if these things interest you: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/639449/a-city-on-mars-by-kelly-and-zach-weinersmith/

Yet another authentication/credential management provider has experienced a network breach. The attack on Retool is similar to recent ones on Microsoft, Okta, Twilio, and others in that the TTP's were advanced and well executed. One TTP in particular, assuming it's true, is mind blowing:

"After [a phished Retool employee] logging into the fake portal – which included a MFA form – the attacker called the employee.

The caller claimed to be one of the members of the IT team, and deepfaked our employee’s actual voice. The voice was familiar with the floor plan of the office, coworkers, and internal processes of the company."

Even if the Retool disclosure author is playing fast and loose and the call or voice wasn't actually AI generated, it's still amazing that the attackers had a live human with knowledge of Retool's, business on hand. If AI is now being successfully leveraged in real world social engineering, it's hard to overstate the significance.

I asked Retool to clarify, and it declined, citing an ongoing law enforcement investigation.

https://retool.com/blog/mfa-isnt-mfa/

Reading @pluralistic talking about #interoperability realized that has been bog standard in music production for decades. TS/TRS cables mean any brand guitar can go through any brand pedal and then into any brand amp. Likewise, with electronic instruments nearly all of them since the mid 80’s have #midi so any instrument can send performance or clock data to another regardless of brand.