Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

@veronica @patrizia see also https://theoatmeal.com/comics/happy_easter :-)

@rylancole Glad to hear it! I think I originally picked it up for it's examination of the concept of race, but its focus is more specifically on the historical relationship between concepts of intelligence and race, so it has interesting things to say on both topics.

The most salient takeaway for me was that it seemed these historical figures had set out to try to honestly measure intelligence through ostensibly objective means but their preconceived prejudices blinded them to the flaws in their methods, resulting in racism being baked in to what they produced. As a result, I think it's book that every scientist should read.

@grimalkina I remember reading The Mismeasure of Man when I was in grad school (for physics, so this was just pleasure reading) and being struck when Gould pointed out that the existence of general intelligence is a hypothesis that must be proved; it's by no means obvious that it's true, and the burden of proof is on those asserting it. It was one of those things that's obvious once it's stated, but I don't think I could have clearly articulated it before reading that book.

@__joerg__ @johncarlosbaez @dpiponi In a similar vein, I remember being confused by expressions in quantum optics where a quantity involves partial derivatives by z as well as its complex conjugate.

@__joerg__ @johncarlosbaez @dpiponi Funny, I was going to say that I recognize the ambiguity with the Lagrangian but I was always far more confused by the similar ambiguity when learning thermodynamics.

@alexwild "Best"

@Frederik_Borgesius The channel https://youtube.com/@TastingHistory is along the same lines and quite entertaining. I wouldn't be shocked if he cooked something from this book.

@dangoodin @micahflee Fastmail also offers a service like that (if you pay for an account with them), which also integrated with 1Password for those who use it. Some folks don't like Fastmail because it is headquartered in Australia, but depending on what problems you're trying to address that may be fine.

@gvwilson I think this is a great preface to debating almost any topic. A related approach is if someone is advocating a different way of doing things to have them list some the negative consequences of making the change.

Even changes that are good on balance generally have drawbacks. If one is convinced a change has only positive consequences it is usually because one has not thought carefully enough about it or is allowing oneself to be deceived by ones ideological preferences.

@kellogh I thought solar thermal energy was generally thought to be the best route for large-scale solar power generation rather than photovoltaics, but maybe that idea has been overturned for some reason.

@filipw Thanks!

@tofugolem @rebeccawatson Talk amongst yourselves, I'll give you a topic: the intellectual dark web is neither intellectual nor on the dark web. Discuss.

@filipw On a tangential topic, are you aware of a good discussion for non-cryptography experts (like me) on the post quantum cryptosystems that explores how they differ from previous systems and the level of confidence that they are not subject to a quantum speed up?

@gregeganSF That does seem like a nice way of approaching vectors vs. one-forms without a bunch of jargon/machinery. Certainly I found the way I was originally taught these concepts to be very opaque.

@JoeGrowling @FMarquardtGroup on my instance the limit is 2^(16) - 1 characters.

@marcprecipice Looking at the first link, it appears that if we (I think, reasonably) assume the crashes involving bikes at stop sign intersections are Poisson distributed, then the change in accident frequency isn't statistically significant (sigma = 12 for the difference).

@peterdrake My current favorite is probably the @seanmcarroll podcast Mindscape. He's a theoretical physicist who does interdisciplinary work in philosophy, so those topics feature frequently, but there's also an eclectic mix of other topics that interest him.

I suppose it is sometimes two white men having unscripted opinions, but it's generally directed at specific topics in which at least one of them is an expert, and a fair number of his guests are not white men.

@tshirtman @alcea @koyu@koyu.space I also agree that there is a whole different issue with infotainment and driver distraction. And potential legal liability might be a stumbling block there.

@tshirtman @alcea @koyu@koyu.space I definitely wouldn't claim expertise here. My point was more that if the infotainment software can impact safety-critical systems I would regard that as a big problem already, independent of open source. I know that there were some exploits where researchers were able to engage the breaks remotely on certain cars, so it seems like this was still a problem in the recent past.