Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

Some Thoughts on Debate On The Internet:

What Good Debate Looks Like:

Hello, I was reading your post, and have some different thoughts on the matter. Here are some legitimate sources that back up my ideas. Thanks for listening.

What Bad Debate Looks Like:

Jesus Christ, what a ridiculous idea! Here is a personal anecdote and a podcast I heard about why you're an idiot.

Remember:

Unless you have a doctorate in the subject you're talking about (and sometimes even if you do) the point of debate is to learn something new, and challenge your own thoughts on the matter.

If this is a very personal matter that you feel really emotional about, take a minute to think or calm down before you respond. Passion is great when used in a controlled manner, but can come off irrational if it isn't.

Yep, you have the right to free speech, but people also have to right to ignore you, especially if you are being rude or dismissive.

Anecdotes are not evidence! Your life experience is not everyone's. That doesn't mean people don't care, they may just not understand.

It's better to make allies than enemies. Most of the people I've met on Mastodon, other than a few exceptions, have been left leaning and want similar things. Before you go off on a small issues, try to establish what you have in common.

Make sure you actually understand what a person is saying before you get upset and block. I've read posts that have seemed sexist, racist, or homophobic, but it was out of context or I misread it, it's great to ask questions. Also, remember you may have information that this person doesn't have about why something is inappropriate. Give that information in a kind way, with sources.

Black In Robotics travel awards for students and postdocs in robotics are due by 10/15/23. You can be reimbursed for up to $2000 for travel to a robotics conference. Must be a member of Black In Robotics, it's free and fun!

Learn more here:
https://blackinrobotics.org/bir-student-conference-travel#:~:text=Eligibility&text=The%20BiR%20student%20and%20postdoc,up%20to%20%242000%20per%20applicant.

Questions? Email blackInRobotics@Gmail.com

“If more of us valued food & cheer & song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

J.R.R. Tolkien

Faculty positions at Birmingham Theory Group.

The University of Birmingham is recruiting a number of academics at assistant/associate professor level in the School of Computer Science:

* https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DCA296/assistant-professor

* https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DCA300/associate-professor

The Theory of Computation group at Birmingham is world-renowned, and we have been actively recruiting new researchers for some years now. More information about the group is here:

https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/computer-science/theory-of-computation/index.aspx

Please encourage interested students, postdocs and colleagues to apply! For informal enquiries, please contact me by email, or Dr Anupam Das and/or any other member of the group if you intend to make an application.

Oh my goodness, it worked! That message was tooted from the Newton :D here’s how it looked in action. #RetroComputing #newton

Mathematician Bernhard Riemann was born #OTD in 1826.

He made deep contributions to complex analysis and number theory, but physicists remember him for his work on the foundations of geometry. These insights provide the mathematical framework for general relativity.

AITA, academic publishing edition.

Journal sends a review back to me because when I did not run the code and replicate the results.

My response: "As an unpaid anonymous peer reviewer who handles probably 30 manuscripts a year, I am absolutely not in the position of running and evaluating code any more than I am in the position of running gels to evaluate lab results. If this is important to you, I suspect you can find a consultant who will do it at a reasonable rate."

Am I the asshole?

Philips has decided to enshittify its popular Hue lights.
https://tech.lgbt/@eclairwolf/111067232065621122
This is an absurd bait-and-switch, and will only cause pain for customers.

#Philips #Hue #PhilipsHue #Enshittification

Here’s the video I did about Boss Lee in April. It was inevitable that she was going to die after refusing chemo as a “scam” but it’s still sad. I hope her fans now realize ozone treatment, herbs, and essential oils don’t work. http://youtu.be/3DUTipa4fms

Have you considered that the video signal is bad because you keep plugging it in to the mustard port

This post was brought to you by SCART gang

I tend to think most “holidays” are weird old traditions that don’t make sense to keep around; vestigial relics of a dead era.

But today is September 16.

On this day in ‘87, politicians and rulers from 46 countries gathered in #Montreal to negotiate and sign a treaty called the Montreal Protocol. This agreement, if ratified, would establish an international ban on producing substances that damaged the #ozone layer.

It was ratified by 197 independent states – every UN member – ignoring the complaints of the #CFC industry.

CFCs were banned, and the ozone layer hole has been gradually healing every year. The Montreal Protocol has been called “perhaps the single most successful international agreement”.

For me, that’s worthy of celebration.

Happy #MontrealProtocol day.

#climate #mtl

I know I've said I don't agree with doing call out posts. But this is a call out and each of you knows who you are.

Today was ... interesting. If you followed me for the past months over on the shitbird site, you might have seen a bunch of angry German words, lots of graphs, and the occassional news paper, radio, or TV snippet with yours truely. Let me explain.

In Austria, inflation is way above the EU average. There's no end in sight. This is especially true for basic needs like energy and food.

Our government stated in May that they'd build a food price database together with the big grocery chains. But..

I have questions…

Musk’s X revokes paid blue check from United Auto Workers after strike called

After a report called out Musk's union-busting, UAW's blue check got reinstated.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/musks-x-revokes-paid-blue-check-from-united-auto-workers-after-strike-called/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

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.