Friday Ephemera (705)
Judgement promptly validated. || Ice-cream scoop insertions and other medical emergencies. || Somewhat related: Things done to penises in 2023. || Recovered Kodachromes of New York in the Fifties and Sixties. (h/t, Lancastrian Oik) || Like conkers, I guess. || On crime and incarceration. || Question asked, answered. || Being so clever, he doesn’t believe in sky daddy. || Lion relocation. || If you got rid of the toaster, you’d have space for one of these. || Suboptimal road surface. || Set-up and payoff. || The progressive retail experience, parts 526 and 527. || Pressing oil. || For enthusiasts of diecast model cars, The Little Wheels Museum. (h/t, Things) || I laughed and I’m not sorry. || A little artistic licence. || At last, a shower-toilet combo. || And finally, a hawk encounters a kitten with a force field.
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“homicides in Britain”
It’s all such big data – ms mouse was part of a project examining infant/ birth mortality, and as she put it, said data was “uniformly crap”. I do know that “homicide” is calculated very differently around the globe, so I chuckle when such “comparisons” get bandied about.
I have read about how differently infant mortality is calculated around the globe, but know nothing about global differences in calculating homicide data–aside from the fact that some countries just don’t record all deaths.
S. Weasel is now a British citizen. I wonder what crimes she has in mind.
Nah. They’re not seriously expecting to attract men. Their grift is in making themselves as unappealing as possible and using that reality as grist for their whoa-is-me victimization, gimme-gimme-gimme game. Especially if by any chance..bonus… they may have previously reproduced and thus have hungry mouths to feed. Not that they’re all that interested in letting much of that gift ever make it to those hungry mouths.
Most big data, the kind of data that has any human subjectivity applied to it at all, is garbage. Ms. Mouse is spot on in her suspicions. I find it somewhat amusing that the Big Head that is Scott Adams seems to think he caught onto this reality as a result of observing Covid data. Long after the fact. The only data from this historically most observed, most measured, most commented on “scientific” event in the history of the world is maybe, maaaaaaybe two things. One, the Diamond Princess study, and two, the excess mortality numbers. But both, especially the latter, are themselves wrought with issues. But don’t believe me. I’m an idiot. I’m being told this often and repeatedly now by ever so many of my betters. Because they be smaaaaaart. College and shit. Advanced degrees. Not stupid dumb ass BS’s from land grant colleges.
Infant mortality data: in Europe many countries only record a “live birth” if the baby lives past a certain number of days. In the US if the baby takes a breath it is a live birth but if it dies a few days later is infant mortality. This accounts for most of why US infant mortality is higher.
Does anyone believe that Africa records homicide stats?
Today’s X.com entertainment.
Fancy a flutter on which substance(s) were involved?
Also trending: #shrinkage
Looking to hire a nanny? I have the perfect candidate.
“Sites like io9 used to have quite in-depth articles by people who knew their nerdish stuff. But now, the content is by default ineptly-written trash.“
I still visit them, but the quality has dropped off a cliff, and browsing sites like Tor for upcoming literature has become a minefield too, as ‘queer/ethnic retelling of …’ seems to factor promintently as if it was a good thing in and of itself, rather than any other factor about a new book.
It’s the same laziness and pandering that infests film and tv making.
The drop in quality – which tracks pretty much perfectly with the rise in wokeness – is quite striking. At one time, pre-wokeness-by-default, the reader could differentiate at least some of the contributors, who had differing interests and perspectives, areas of arcane knowledge. You could read a lengthy article and not necessarily agree with all of the points being made, but still appreciate the writer’s knowledge of the subject matter, and enjoy being reminded of episodes and subplots you’d forgotten about.
Now, the site, like so many others, is a generic slurry of shilling and contrived fangirling, written largely by people with no discernible standards or talent.
Where there used to be a sense of knowledgeable niche fun, and people sharing an enthusiasm for obscure comics or dodgy TV shows or whatever, there’s now just woke boilerplate and a weird political conformity. And the more they mention “diversity” – by which they mean brown people and lesbians mouthing identical claptrap – the more monotonous and flavourless the site seems. In short, it’s lost any character. It’s now just another woke shilling platform, indistinguishable from dozens of others.
One of my best managers was female. She worked for Bell Northern Research many moons ago (she relocated to Richardson, Texas, to manage Yanks like me in the mid 1990s). Maybe females that manage semi-real things (I’m a software weasel) aren’t as crazy as those that don’t. (I can think of a couple more examples of non-crazy female managers; I’m married to one of those examples. The other one is the CTO of a multinational company; she too worked at the Big Nerd Ranch back in the day.) YMMV.
Maybe they’re kinda sorta on the spectrum, so they are not possessed of typical female AWFLness.
But woman-despising George Takei disapproves of your “bigotry”.
I strongly suspect our different experiences are mostly due to random chance. Even if the average is less good than for male managers, there can still be lots of good ones.
I experienced, back in the 70’s and 80’s, what I now believe was a harbinger of this: According to the gay and/or leftist writers and fans, the only good sf writers were gay and/or leftist. It was annoying, but I never suspected that things would degenerate as they have.
Perhaps because when expressing suspicions that things would degenerate as they actually have one was met with sufficient pushback and outright derision causing one to employ a subconscious repression of thoughts that other things could possibly degenerate further. Bah. That’s crazy talk.
Moral decay of another sort:
Hamas supporters have been blockading the Jewish community of Armour Heights in Toronto for more than a week. There are no embassies or other Israeli government presence there, just lots of Canadian Jews.
Police are even facilitating the delivery of food and coffee to the Hamas supporters. In contrast to how they treated the Canadian trucker protesters, who were arrested and their bank accounts frozen.
Heh. Speaking of things degenerating to levels one might have imagined but dared not speak of. Because crazy talk.
It never occurred to me that things could degenerate because these were seemingly just a few people and especially because I did not notice the pattern for a while. (Nor could I notice a pattern until I found out about all the recommended writers, which took years.)
Furthermore, you have to notice not only what people say, but also what they don’t say.
That reminds me of something I read long ago:
(This is only a vague restating, as best I recall, of what I read long ago.)
And also:
It would be difficult to find anyone at Harvard (or MIT or Stanford etc) who grew up on a farm–much less had a parent or grandparent who did. That’s something that only the plebs do, not us Superior Minds.
(Found via Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Twitter.)
I don’t feel fear, just pity.
Reminds me of childhood.
But then I scrolled down and saw this.
Does that inspire pity or a Terrible Resolve to Smash the Heretics?
I don’t feel fear, just pity.
TBF, it is not all that different than a bean burrito in a flour tortilla other than the fact that the beans in the burrito actually have flavor and a burrito is edible.
I think perhaps they picked this up trying to culturally appropriate from Spanish sailors captured from the Armada but the concept of a tortilla was just too much.
Regardless, I’ve got to find something innocuous to tease the Brits about.
I hope that’s the end of Solomon Grundy.
More bewilderment.
To be clear, I’m not at all sniffy about comfort food. And if someone were to serve me, say, poached eggs on toast with a whisper of grated cheese, I’d be quite content.
Poached eggs can be tricky to get right.
More bewilderment.
Not as bewildering as putting milk and sugar in tea.
How long ’til he sues Bass Pro Shops for not having warning signs?
I rarely drink tea, though I don’t mind it if it’s offered. I do have an occasional cup of green tea, with a drop of unsweetened lime juice. But it occurs to me that you can’t really offer that to any workmen you have in. So there’s a neglected box of PG Tips somewhere.
Fidel would be proud of his son’s accomplishments.
If it’s any balm to your wounded sensibilities, she’s making iced tea.
Yes, James Patterson really is more a brand for ghostwriters than an author.
This is a real James Patterson book which you can find on Amazon:
It’s the modern day Mrs. Grundys that concern me.
Milk and sugar in hot tea is quite nice.
I thought microwaving tea was one of the few remaining capital crimes in the UK.
Microwaved vs. brought to full boil in a kettle.
Lipton vs. real brands.
Bags vs. loose.
Let the religious wars begin! Deus volt!
Yes, but the arrival of millions of hostile savages is a very big problem.
Not sorry.
ARGH, make it STOP …
I don’t remember Romanians being so, shall we say, middle eastern looking.
Decades ago my lab senior told me, “There are only two constants. God, and battery voltage.”
One of the things I’ve noticed is that men are more able to make a decision and then be happy with the outcome because they weighed the costs and accepted those costs. For example, if a husband decides it is worth it to commute farther so his kids can go to a good school, he will be ok with the commute and not complain.
Women (at least in America) tend to want the ability to have a do-over. They return far more to stores. They dump husbands (70% of divorces). They simultaneously want a career and to stay home with kids. The inability to recognize and deal with costs/consequences I think explains lots of what has gone off the rails. It also explains why the more feminism has won the battle, the more unhappy women are (as shown by many surveys).
Bound and determined to piss away what little credibility they had left.
The Language of Astronomy Is Needlessly Violent and Inaccurate.
Yes, most hugs involve the collision and destruction of stars and planets.
Scientifically truthful truthiness from “Scientific” American.
Of course.
You beat me to it: I was going to make the same comment.
The author is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Texas. There is no excuse for such twattery. Unforgivable.
Half the population has an IQ below 100. Ten percent below 85.
Very roughly five percent are psychopaths.
Need I go on?