SwingingTheLamp @ SwingingTheLamp @midwest.social

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1,092

Joined

2 yr. ago

So sorry to hear. It happened to my father, too, but we all saw it.

Clarke's third law is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I have the notion that any technology becomes uninteresting and not cool once reaches the level of magic. We are tactile and inquisitive creatures, so objects that appeal to our hands and perceptions are cool. Once we can no longer grasp the parts, literally or metaphorically, they're no longer alluring.

Phones, cars, screens, computers, anything. Why is Amiga HAM mode fascinating to many people still, even when they're emulating it on a 32-bit-depth screen that can concurrently play high-quality video streamed over the Internet? That's why.

I can't pass up the opportunity to point out that that list of words was not part of the cognitive assessment that he "aced." He forgot that list. Person, man, woman, camera, and TV were just objects in his field of vision at the moment he was speaking in the interview.

I've been pointing out his dementia symptoms for years now. Why does it still feel so shitty to be proved right by time? :-/

In this case, I think adding an article would also have cleared the garden path— that is, "The Doctor Who [...]" — but yeah, the meaning is clear enough this way.

Kinda tongue-in-cheek questions, but: Honey isn't an animal body part, it isn't produced by animal bodies, so if it is an animal product because bees process it, is wheat flour (for example) an animal product because humans process it? How about hand-kneaded bread? Does that make fruit an animal product because the bees pollinated the flowers while collecting the nectar?

But have we tried feeding a human infant 24kg of fish per week? Y'know, for science.

Think you're really righteous?!

I've put some effort into improving my visualization since learning about aphantasia. Upon reading the prompt, I was able to imagine a colorless ball, but with shading to indicate a 3D shape, like a preview render in a CAD program. That's progress! It didn't have a size inherently. For the table, I could picture a white, rectangular plane hovering in a black void. If it was a normal dinner table size, then the ball was something like a softball or basketball.

And that's it. That exhausted my ability to visualize. No person, no push, no motion. Best I can do is to see the white rectangle after the ball has rolled off of the edge.

Did anyone tell you that his daughter had recurrent health issues, and had two forms of pneumonia at the time of her death, either one of which could have caused the symptoms that the hospital thought could have indicated "shaken baby syndrome"?

No? Actually, nobody told the jury at his trial, as well. This case was a mockery of justice from the start.

In a nutshell, the Democrats can't convince people to vote against the dangerous candidate because right-wing populism inoculates people against facts and logic by making those things out-group markers, per se. Identity is powerful, and the human brain treats threats to identity in exactly the same way as physical threats.

And, on the other side, Democrats can't recognize this and respond appropriately, because they've made not-recognizing-it a marker of in-group identity, and they are thereby unable to decode what would make an attractive policy plan.

Respect!

Terrible, terrible advice. That leaves a full car-length of empty pavement with the driver sight-lines of modern SUV and crossover designs. Pickup trucks are worse; I've seen pickup truck drivers stop a full 30 feet back. It wastes huge amounts of space on the street, and causes traffic congestion. On the other side of the coin, van and bus drivers can still get right up on your ass when following this advice.

Found the physics teacher.

Refuse to do free work for a company—insist that the grocery store employees go and gather the items on your list from the shelves for you! Never set foot on the sales floor, do pickup orders online only!

Background: It used to be that the proprietor of a store brought items you requested to the counter for you. In 1916, Piggly Wiggly pioneered a new grocery store model, requiring/allowing the customers to pick items off of the shelves themselves. Not only did they not give you a discount for doing their work for them, they raked in more money from impulse purchases. The increased sales more than offset the increase in shoplifting losses. A cynical, corporate ploy to bleed customers dry, and we just think it's normal now!

That is to say, the purpose of a grocery store is to provide food in exchange for currency. There's no law of nature that I know of that says that having an underpaid teenager drag your food across the scanner is the only proper way to do check-out, just like there isn't one that says only a store employee can pick items from the shelf.

This comment neatly summarizes centrist Democrats to me. "We know that we need to do this to win, but don't do it because we might not win." Just like the arguments that LGBTQ groups shouldn't have been pushing for equality 20 years ago, because it would alienate voters and harm Democrats.

Y'know, sometimes voters respect a principled stand, and the courage to push for what's right.

All I got was a cracked screen.

Pulao, I'm assuming Punjab-style: Brown half a chopped onion in oil in the pressure cooker, toss in some spices from the dabba to let them get fragrant, then add basmati rice and chopped veggies. Put the cover on, get it up to pressure for a couple of minutes, then natural release. Top with a couple spoonfuls of curd (yogurt), and it's delicious.

Except you're not getting along with others, but instead ascribing negative traits (i.e. disagreeableness) to people who may have different neurobiology, instead of having empathy to try to understand how they may experience sensory input differently than you do.

Misophonia, PTSD, autism, ADHD, hypervigilance, and more. There are lots of reasons that loud videos on a phone in a public space can wreck somebody else's day that they have no control over. Please have some empathy.

I saw a melanistic eastern grey squirrel this summer, which Wikipedia tells me has a prevalence of about 1 in 10,000. It was just pokin' around my campsite when I woke up one morning. Oh! And I just remembered seeing eyeless fish and salamanders in caves.

All of these examples across your comments have this in common: People who were feeling guilty about something, and then lashing out at you in anger for allegedly calling them out on the issue. This is a very common coping strategy that people use, and it's really not your fault at all because they didn't tell you up front about their feelings. They just want to make it seem that it is your fault to deflect from their own unpleasant feelings.

This is a really hard one to learn to detect if you're not tuned into people (that is, autistic). Hell, it's a hard one to detect for everybody. You kind of have to watch for body language which indicates discomfort: Body stiffness, blank affect, disengaging from conversation, flared nostrils, clipped syllables, curt replies. If you see those indicators, change the topic.