And we're back to my complaint about the article. For some people, veganism is hard. Obviously it isn't hard for everyone, and I never said everyone, but for some people it is.
Articles like the one posted created a divide and encourage the belittlement of people trying to do better rather than suggesting anyone try to help people get closer to veganism.
You said that I said:
“Cooking vegan is hard”
False. I said BEING vegan is hard. It is morally correct, but it can be difficult. Later you compare eating cheese to being a sociopath. I'm pretty sure that even sociopaths can feign compassion in public when someone explains how they are having trouble achieving their goals.
You said:
90% of non-vegan recipes can be made vegan by leaving out or substituting non-vegan ingredients.
This is where I know you are not serious. 90%? Please. My mom visited from out of state a few weeks back. At restaurants and her friend's house where she stayed (she won't stay with us), she ate: eggs, bacon, buttered toast, coffee, lox and cream cheese on bagels with red onions and capers, oysters, lobster, calamari, moussaka, hummus, baklava, general tso's chicken, sushi, sashimi, gyoza, chicken tandoori, saag paneer, vegetable pakora, roast beef in aus jus, brussle sprouts with bacon, pepperoni pizza, deviled eggs, macaroni salad, a black and bleu burger with onion rings, and so on. I don't know how to make eggs and bacon without eggs and bacon. I don't know how to make lox without fish. I CAN make moussaka with veggie crumbles instead of meat, but I don't know how to get that eggy quality without the eggs in there. I do make vegan hummus. Baklava without honey? How? Sashimi? How? Gyoza? How? Saag is vegan. Paneer is not. I've never been able to make Indian food properly despite repeated tries, so while in theory I could make a Saag without paneer, the reality is it would be awful regardless of the animal content. I have to stick with whatever the restaurant has.
But you’re saying “I pay other people to torture animals for my pleasure and I’m not going to stop”, and we’re supposed to, what, smile and nod and agree how hard it is to not torture animals for pleasure?
Yes to both counts. I am saying, "I pay people to torture animals for me and despite my regrets about that, I am not going to stop until there is another way to get a similar joy-of-food experience." AND I am saying that YOU should say, "I know it is hard for you to stop paying people to torture animals for you."
Do you also yell at depressed people for bringing everyone down? Do you think people are unaware of their failings? What sort of juvenile ego tripper gets off on yelling at people during their confessions?
What type of soil do you have? To simplify, let's limit it to three choices: sandy/loose, loamy/rich, or clay/rocky/stiff?
My biggest advice is to use your own tree leaves and any lawn clippings that weren't mulched back into the yard to make compost and NOT use things like MicracleGro that add salts to your soil because -- while the initial crop may benefit -- the salts will linger in that soil after the nutrients are absorbed and you won't be able to keep using that soil if you keep adding those chemical fertilizers. You don't have to go crazy about composting. Just pile the leaves together and let it sit. If you have lots of leaves, make your pile a row-shape so it is as long as you want, but no thicker than 3-4 feet. Thicker than that means oxygen can't reach the center.
I learned that from this radio show back when I gardened: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1087444113/you-bet-your-garden
That guy has all kinds of advice for the serious gardener, too, and I was never serious about it. There are people who actually FLUFF their compost! Can you imagine going out every week or so to toss around dead plant matter with a pitch fork just for aeration? Noooooo! I just let it sit and didn't worry that it would take longer.
If you want to go beyond the pot and have a spot with sun, I recommend trying strawberries. Get live plants and pop them in the ground, then wait until the next spring. They are an easy early crop and they will replenish themselves with runners so you can get years of enjoyment out of them without having to buy more plants. Also, home grown are going to taste a thousand times better than anything in the grocery store. It looks like Maine has already figured out which grow best there. Note some are more disease resistant than others. https://extension.umaine.edu/highmoor/research/strawberry-variety-testing-at-highmoor-farm/
Other easy crops (2 for pots, the rest for ground):
- cherry tomato -- does well in big pots
- rosemary -- extremely pottable! then take it inside for the winter. I'm told this is a winning strategy, but my rosemary always dies in the winter despite coming inside.
- mint -- not just easy to grow, but hard to get rid of once in the groud
- garlic -- my yard is too rocky for garlic, but I grew it for years anyway. It even survived getting mowed down several times.
- leeks -- mine were scraggly, but they made for gorgeous flowers so I let them go to seed and lo! They kept coming back from seed on their own! https://extension.umn.edu/vegetables/growing-leeks
- lettuce -- cold weather crop. Lettuce becomes bitter as it matures, but you can throw seeds on the ground in the early spring and harvest before summer. If you miss the window and it starts to 'bolt' (gets tall), let it go to seed and more will come up next year.
Anyone try meat glue? Transglutaminase? Yes, it is ALSO used to glue small low-quality bits of meat into roasts and such, but in addition to being a glue, it is also used as a thickener. I'm pretty sure all the "Greek yogurt" we've seen in the last 20 years are because Transglutaminase was added to regular yogurt (cheap!) rather than the traditional Greek method of straining regular yogurt until the water was halved (expensive!).
Info:
- https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/transglutaminase
- https://www.aceingredients.com/transglutaminase-enzyme-revolutionizing-plantbased-meat.html
sample vegan versions:
Maybe I shouldn't post here because I'm not vegan, but I respect vegans for doing the obviously correct thing. Personally, I don't have the willpower to do it, but I HAVE tried to reduce my meat consumption. That said, I get annoyed with articles like this for reasons I will describe beneath relevant quotes. I offer these thoughts as a starting point for a better way to nudge omnivores towards less cruel consumption.
Imagine you knew a way to cut your carbon footprint by more than half; it was easy, required no real major sacrifice on your part...
Depending where you live, avoiding meat, eggs, dairy, honey, et cetera is NOT easy and IS a real sacrifice. If you live in California, you can find vegan options everywhere. If you live in Minnesota, Kansas, or various other places, you are effectively saying you will never eat out again, never sample the flavors of your Church potlucks, and bring all your own food to the family reunions. This is a hard social sacrifice to take and will be accompanied by eye rolls and some negative feedback. The authors surely know this, but act like it is nothing. At the very least, the requirement that you never ever eat out again -- even when you are sick or worked a double shift and now have to make your own dinner because the closest thing to vegan you can order is a sad meatless, cheeseless pizza is an effort.
“People quickly derail the topic,” she said, “and begin talking about other things, such as how they seek to avoid food waste and plastic packaging.”
Of course they do! Who doesn't try to change the topic when someone is trying to push you into something you don't want to do?
Cutting out meat entirely was seen as an absurd position – and one only taken by haughty stick-in-the-muds, Ditlevsen explained. “There was a tendency for them to […] scold vegans for being extremists,” she noted.
Well, yeah, when an article suggests that veganism is easy, requires no sacrifice, doesn't take time to learn new recipes and methods of cooking, intonates that there's something wrong with trying to talk about other things, and doesn't then see itself as haughty better-than-thou radicals, then it is time to call that article extremist.
For a lot of people -- myself included -- veganism is HARD. It would be easier if vegans could sympathize with that. There's a growing contingent of low-to-no-meat eaters that mostly cook without meat, but have things they aren't going to give up. For me, I'm not giving up cheese. I can try to get slightly more ethical cheese, but we all know cheese means calves aren't with their moms. It is cruel. I know. If I'd never had cheese, I'd never start eating it, and I am eagerly anticipating cheese made with lab-grown milk, but for now I know I'm contributing to animal abuse.
If you came up to me and said, "You know CHEESE is ABUSE" I would not be thankful for the information. I would be annoyed that I didn't have lab-grown cheese yet. I've got beyond burgers for my beef cravings, but all the vegan cheeses I've tried have failed me (I want something like a St. Andre triple creme).
I used to raise ducks for the eggs. We had freakin' happy ducks with their own pool, lots of space, and frequent treats. Most of our ducks died of old age, but we did lose some to animal attacks. We ate the remnants where we could. We are back to buying eggs maybe once a month or so, but only eggs from happy chickens we can visit.
If you tell me that isn't good enough, I have to tell you that sometimes I want eggs.
Heck, sometimes I want fast food and can't think of a vegan option. In fact, my company had a California/Indian Manager come visit and the first thing I was asking him was if he was vegan or vegetarian because that would matter for getting lunch. He assured us all that he'd have no problem finding lunch and to simply pick a place that could easily seat 12. Stupidly, we listened to him. He IS vegetarian and his only lunch option was off-menu buttered spaghetti because the place that is both close and has big tables is also mostly meat. They only serve spaghetti with meat sauce and the only vegan item is a side salad. The 'regular' salad has ham and cheese.
I've gone on too long. I'm just saying that the article minimizes the difficulty and encourages an attitude that won't win anyone over. I hope the lemmy-verse is better than that and maybe we all can encourage more people to minimize animal consumption even if those people aren't ready to go... cold turkey? You know what I mean. Don't make Perfect the enemy of Good.
Yeah, it is hard to find gizzards on most menus. If french fries are going to be too starchy, gizzards have the same sort of bite-size quality for snacking enjoyment. If you like hot sauce, it works well on gizzards, but imho they are perfect as-is straight out of the fryer and don't need any sauce at all.
On the wrong side of Muskegon, at W. Sherman and Sanford Street there is a really good "Chicken Coop". I'm told that other Chicken Coops may not be as good, but the Muskegon one never let me down. It is take-out only. Very cramped. Get the gizzards. You might also want any of the fish meals, and look for seasonal specials like deep fried asparagus in the spring (pretty much everything is deep fried). It is not haute cuisine, but surprisingly good comfort food for a fair price -- not super cheap, but still a good value for what you get.
hooray for broody girls! We can't get mad when they are being such good guardians. :-)
I've been sick. My guess is covid, but a home test was negative ... but it was also 2 years expired, so I don't know if that was a valid test or if I did it right. Anyway, I've been exceptionally stupid and reactive between bouts of coughing and napping. Feeling a wee bit better now, though.
If you haven't encountered it yet: bad eggs really do explode. I haven't seen them explode any distance nor into tiny pieces, but we did have a nest with an egg that was turning color and I didn't think to remove it. A day or so later, I heard a muffled POP and looked to see the mama with a look of stiff panic as she sat incredibly erect on her nest. I shooed her off and found a horrible , stinky mess. Mama got a bath, we put the whole next in tripled garbage bags, and wrote off the clutch as potentially infected. Mama was not happy.
I want his press secretary give a conference TODAY and say something like:
I want The Press to engage in a thought experiment with me. Imagine if our president came out and said, "The Supreme Court has granted Presidents immunity from prosecution in matters of the official duty. Well, it is my official duty to warn America that the Court is corrupt. It has been rotted out by folks like Harlan Crow who has corrupted the already dubious ethics of Clarence Thomas into the little stooge he's become. Both these men should be dead. So, too, should Altio and Kavanaugh. I wouldn't lose any sleep if I woke up tomorrow to news there were three particular open seats for what was once the highest court. Heck, I might even pardon the guilty. Of course Congress would try to block me from appointing replacement Justices, but it is possible that folks like Mitch McConnell, Jim Jordon, Ted Cruz and others might meet with some tragically fatal accidents, and then maybe Congress wouldn't have so many objections. I can't advocate for that, of course. I might be tickled pink to see it, but I can't tell anyone to go out and do it. I won't even suggest it! And remember: a presidential pardon only works on federal cases. States might prosecute anyone committing such heinous acts. On the other hand, if a President had a privileged conversation about the Constitution with a State Governor, well... that Governor might decide to do a favor for that unindictable President. God Bless America and God Bless our troops.
-- at which point the Press Secretary calls for questions.
Trump stole money from cancer kids. I don't understand how anyone can miss the slime dripping off him. Yeah, I'm partisan about this.
-- and while he's at it, maybe Biden could see that Alito and Thomas met with some unfortunate fatality... and if congress does not think he should be allowed to replace them, perhaps they, too, would suddenly find their numbers shrinking as the pile of bodies mounts (I'm looking at you, Mitch McConnell).
What general geographic region are we talking?
No help here, but .... is it the lighting or is this bird truly green? I'm used to grackles having pale yellow eyes that contrast with their dark plumage. I also look for a slightly long tail that becomes a blunt paddle as they land.
That can work with ranked choice voting, but we don't have that. Technically, we CAN vote for anyone over 35 and born in the U.S., but practically, this just splits the vote. This worked for Republicans when George Wallace split the Democratic vote such that Nixon won with 43%, and it worked for democrats when Ross Perot split the Republican vote such that Clinton also won with 43%.
Our system only allows 2 options. Any '3rd' option is a vote against your best interests. So is not voting. That said, yeah, I'd vote for a replacement.
I just heard Steve Bannon doing that fascist thing where -- when confronted with the fact that he said on his radio show that he wanted to see particular heads on spikes -- Bannon acted like that was just rhetoric. He didn't really mean it. Except he knows his followers DO mean it. And he's still calling for dismantling the government and remaking it into a permanent dictatorship.
So if that is what it means to vote Republican this election, then I'm gonna be a yellow dog democrat about it.
Not the person you were replying to, but the "doom" spouter here. I realize you are 100% right that my post might make people less inspired to vote. I'm sorry for that. I was very distressed at the time. My intent was to emphasize that: while a rational person might complain about either candidate, one is substantially worse and we MUST vote in favor of democracy when the other choice (and his advisors) are openly saying they want to dismantle the institutional expertise that understand how stuff works (which materials are suitable for building roads on various substructures, or where groundwater migrates and how to prevent contamination, and yes, how to figure out how a virus works). They call these people "the deep state", which minimizes the reason we want them to keep their apolitical jobs. Of course the experts -- like everyone --will likely have political opinions, but that doesn't mean they are partisan. As long as they look at data and derive truthful results regardless of their personal politics, it doesn't matter. Obviously we should fire those who can't do their job or hide/ignore/promote information such that their results are distorted to favor a personal agenda (also knowing that some data SHOULD be rejected if acquired by dubious means, isn't reproduced in other trials, etc.).
Anyway, I apologize for the negativity. Thank you for calling me out! :-)
It's the first LGBTQ+ monument in the U.S. National Park Service
Title article has overview, but this ABC piece has more context: https://abcnews.go.com/US/stonewall-uprising-veteran-honors-protest-historic-lgbtq-center/story?id=111454893
> Mark Segal was 18 years old and had only lived in New York City for six weeks when he found himself at the center of the Stonewall Uprising in 1969. > > The very spot where Segal once danced, drank and took part in one of the most consequential moments in LGBTQ history is now the first LGBTQ visitor center within the National Park System.
> "At that time, we as a community were totally invisible," said Segal. "LGBT people were not in newspapers, were not in magazines, were not radio, not in television."
...
> He continued, "Please don't be mournful. Be cheerful, because what happened [in the LGBTQ equality movement] got us to where we are today. So we should be somewhat celebratory. I know some of us didn't make it. But we're in a better place thanks to those people."
Biden spoke at the opening, as well as several other notable people: https://abc7ny.com/post/nyc-pride-president-joe-biden-visit-stonewall-national/15007800/
> He told the cheering crowd, "its your love for each other and your community that brought this center to life."
>Legendary singer, songwriter and pianist Elton John was also in attendance for the ceremony. > >"I can say as a proud English, gay man, that this is one of the greatest honors of my life to be here today," he said. "The fight for freedom and equality is an ongoing one."
See also:
- https://www.cntraveler.com/story/new-york-stonewall-national-monument-visitor-center
- https://www.fastcompany.com/91148016/the-stonewall-inn-monument-gets-a-slick-new-visitors-center
Park Service site: https://www.nps.gov/ston/index.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Democratic_National_Convention
The 2024 Democratic National Convention ... is scheduled to be held August 19 to 22, 2024, at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois.
Keep it up! In fact, if you get criticized, you can point out that you'd rather have a leader you CAN criticize than one that gets treated like a God-ling. Point out that one of the differences in the generic liberal versus conservative thought is the idea that a leader might be flawed but generally good at leading versus the idea that everyone needs to support the leader (or the cause) no matter what -- until their transgressions become too extreme and gets them ostracized. Please. Let's criticize early and be ready to replace them sooner rather than later.
I hear you. A few years back I was rooting for Jeremy Corbin to be Prime Minister and could not understand how the populace didn't choose him. More than that, I sympathize with people who dislike illegal immigration into their respective countries because, well, I can see how it FEELS like, "We built this country to be good and prosperous, and these folks want what WE built while they never built anything like it for themselves" -- but that is a false perception for so many reasons (Was their home a colony or otherwise oppressed? Our ancestors built our countries, but we're just born to them. Climate change is driving equatorial people to Northen climes -- to countries complicit in the climate change that has made their homelands dry and cropless, etc.)
So I don't have a solution for immigration (which Trump harped on constantly). Fixing the climate might help for the long term, but for the short term it won't fix that immediate complaint.
I look at U.S. history and I don't see a strong track record for austerity helping. More the reverse. In The Great Depression, one of the things that seemed to work was letting the government take on debt to give a bunch of people 'stupid' jobs so they could put that money into the economy. Of course, that came with stepp progressive tax rates, too. It was much harder to get rich when the highest brackets were up to/over 90% of income. I doubt the current crop of rich people would allow that to happen in the modern world, but I'd vote for it.
Trump was a lying liar and Biden was a hoarse doddering old man who got lost mid sentence.
On MSNBC, Joy Reid pointed out that Americans want their president to be an avatar. They want a commander who looks strong and tough, and we saw that when the populace couldn't get behind Al Gore (who she credited as being a great mind) who acted more like a policy wank than Bush, who felt more like a (New England) cowboy.
Earlier in the week, I caught a bit of Steve Bannon's radio show where he railed about how we need to eliminate the deep state -- the Praetorian Guard -- that indicted Trump and props up Biden. At the time, I wondered who this Praetorian Guard was supposed to have assassinated, who was bribing them, and which combat actions they'd fought in. If nothing else, I think this debate proves there is no deep state/Praetorian Guard because they'd have assassinated Biden last week during his preparation rather than let him get on stage.
Look, in any large enough group, there are going to be some incompetent people and some competent bad actors. We have to vote for the people who will admit to that and get rid of them. The U.S. is going to have to choose between a leader who tries to install good people to run the government and one who intends to install people bent on dismantling the government and giving loyalty to the leader alone. Even IN the debate, Trump asked Biden, "Who did you fire?" -- that you have to fire bad people ... but this was in reference to firing the General who claimed to have heard Trump call veterans "suckers and losers". I can't prove Trump did or didn't say that, but I do remember Trump skipping the memorial ceremony.
Trump said Charlottesville never happened. I remember it. Trump said Nancy Pelosi admitted responsibility for January 6th. She did not. Trump said the ex-governor of Virginia was not just for late term abortion, but infanticide. He is not. His lies were too numerous to count.
Biden lost track of his thoughts early on and blurted out "We finally beat Medicare." Trump said, "He did beat Medicare and he beat it to death." Biden said Trump had sex with a porn star while (uh, uhm stumble) his wife was pregnant. Trump asserted he did not. Biden called Trump a criminal. Trump said Biden would be the criminal when his term was over (not exact words).
It wasn't good in any direction. It was ugly. Through it, though, Trump maintained his TV-personality persona while Biden generally looked infirm.
Personally, I want a deep state that does things like: build roads, enforce food labeling laws so that the box accurately reflects the food inside, eventually hires enough judges to have a fast turn-around time for family court and the like. It should be really hard to fire them when they are speaking the truth as the understand it and easy to fire them if they are distorting the truth. Alas, I worry that Joy Reid is correct and the U.S. will vote for the guy they think is most like John Wayne.
Attack comes nearly two weeks after Israeli strike in Damascus killed top Iranian commander; Biden arrives at White House to meet with national security team in Situation Room
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have said any threat from the United States and Israel will be met with Tehran’s reciprocal response, Iranian state TV reported.
“Any threat by the United States and the Zionist regime originating from any country will result in a proportional and reciprocal response from Iran towards the origin of the threat,” the Guards said in a statement.
Verbal Verdict is the best use of generative AI I’ve seen.
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12262087
> Excerpts: > > The Verbal Verdict demo drops me into an interrogation room with basic facts about the case to my left, and on the other side of a glass window are three suspects I can call one at a time for questioning. There are no prompts or briefings—I just have to start asking questions, either by typing them or speaking them into a microphone > > > The responses are mostly natural, and at times add just a bit more information for me to follow up on. > > > >Mostly. Sometimes, the AI goes entirely off the rails and starts typing gibberish > > >There are, of course, still many limitations to this implementation of an LLM in a game. Kristelijn said that they are using a pretty “censored” model, and also adding their own restrictions, to make sure the LLM doesn’t say anything harmful. It also makes what should be a very small game much larger (the demo is more than 7GB), because it runs the model locally on your machine. Kristelijn said that running the model locally helps Savanna Developments with privacy concerns. If the LLM runs locally it doesn’t have to see or handle what players are typing. And it also is better for game preservation because if the game doesn’t need to connect to an online server it can keep running even if Savanna Developments shuts down. > > >it’s pretty hard to “write” different voices for them. They all kind of speak similarly. One character in the full version of the game, for example, speaks in short sentences to convey a certain attitude, but that doesn’t come close to the characterization you’d see in a game like L.A. Noire, where character dialogue is meticulously written to convey personality.
Verbal Verdict is the best use of generative AI I’ve seen.
Excerpts: > The Verbal Verdict demo drops me into an interrogation room with basic facts about the case to my left, and on the other side of a glass window are three suspects I can call one at a time for questioning. There are no prompts or briefings—I just have to start asking questions, either by typing them or speaking them into a microphone
> The responses are mostly natural, and at times add just a bit more information for me to follow up on. > >Mostly. Sometimes, the AI goes entirely off the rails and starts typing gibberish
>There are, of course, still many limitations to this implementation of an LLM in a game. Kristelijn said that they are using a pretty “censored” model, and also adding their own restrictions, to make sure the LLM doesn’t say anything harmful. It also makes what should be a very small game much larger (the demo is more than 7GB), because it runs the model locally on your machine. Kristelijn said that running the model locally helps Savanna Developments with privacy concerns. If the LLM runs locally it doesn’t have to see or handle what players are typing. And it also is better for game preservation because if the game doesn’t need to connect to an online server it can keep running even if Savanna Developments shuts down.
>it’s pretty hard to “write” different voices for them. They all kind of speak similarly. One character in the full version of the game, for example, speaks in short sentences to convey a certain attitude, but that doesn’t come close to the characterization you’d see in a game like L.A. Noire, where character dialogue is meticulously written to convey personality.
politico archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/PS7WH
see also: https://thehill.com/homenews/ap/ap-politics/ap-supreme-court-moving-quickly-will-decide-if-trump-can-be-prosecuted-in-election-interference-case/ | thehill archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/W6bFe
Excerpts (politico): > In Wednesday’s order, the Supreme Court granted Trump’s emergency request to maintain that pause while the justices hear Trump’s immunity appeal.
> But the court’s decision to keep the pretrial proceedings frozen is a blow to special counsel Jack Smith’s effort to bring Trump to trial this year. Smith has charged Trump with four felonies stemming from his bid to subvert the 2020 presidential election.
> If they deny the immunity bid by the end of their term in June, it may still be possible for the trial judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, to schedule a trial to begin in late summer or fall. > > The timing of the justices’ eventual ruling could be critical since Chutkan has vowed to give Trump roughly three additional months to prepare for trial if the case is returned to her courtroom.
> That hypothetical schedule would guarantee that much of Trump’s general election calendar is consumed by his mandatory presence in the courtroom, perhaps overlapping with the Republican National Convention or even Election Day itself.
> Chutkan had originally intended to begin the election-subversion trial on March 4, but she nixed that start date due to the delays caused by Trump’s immunity claim. The trial, if it happens, is expected to last several months.
Excerpts (thehill): > That timetable is much faster than usual, but assuming the justices deny Trump’s immunity bid, it’s not clear whether a trial can be scheduled and concluded before the November election. Early voting in some states will begin in September.
> In the end, the timing of a possible trial could come down to how quickly the justices rule. They have shown they can act fast, issuing a decision in the Watergate tapes case in 1974 just 16 days after hearing arguments. The decision in Bush v. Gore came the day after arguments in December 2000. > > By taking up the legally untested question now, the justices have created a scenario of uncertainty that special counsel Jack Smith had sought to avoid when he first asked the high court in December to immediately intervene. In his latest court filing, Smith had suggested arguments a full month earlier than the late April timeframe.
> Though their Supreme Court filing did not explicitly mention the upcoming November election or Trump’s status as the Republican primary front-runner, prosecutors described the case as having “unique national importance” and said that “delay in the resolution of these charges threatens to frustrate the public interest in a speedy and fair verdict.”
The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from different cultures.
Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/XuAaf | Excerpts: > According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, 'consonance'—a pleasant-sounding combination of notes—is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these 'integer ratios' are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them is thought to make music 'dissonant,' unpleasant sounding. > > But researchers from the University of Cambridge, Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, have now discovered two key ways in which Pythagoras was wrong.
First: "We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us."
Second: > "Western research has focused so much on familiar orchestral instruments, but other musical cultures use instruments that, because of their shape and physics, are what we would call 'inharmonic.'"
> "Our findings suggest that if you use different instruments, you can unlock a whole new harmonic language that people intuitively appreciate, they don't need to study it to appreciate it. A lot of experimental music in the last 100 years of Western classical music has been quite hard for listeners because it involves highly abstract structures that are hard to enjoy. In contrast, psychological findings like ours can help stimulate new music that listeners intuitively enjoy."
Meet the guy who taught US intelligence agencies how to make the most of the ad tech ecosystem, "the largest information-gathering enterprise ever conceived by man."
Excerpts below. Article states that it is. "Adapted from Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State, by Byron Tau" Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/5bsWU
2019: > Working with Grindr data, Yeagley began drawing geofences—creating virtual boundaries in geographical data sets—around buildings belonging to government agencies that do national security work. That allowed Yeagley to see what phones were in certain buildings at certain times, and where they went afterwards.
> Then he started looking at the movement of those phones through the Grindr data. When they weren’t at their offices, where did they go? A small number of them had lingered at highway rest stops in the DC area at the same time and in proximity to other Grindr users—sometimes during the workday and sometimes while in transit between government facilities. For other Grindr users, he could infer where they lived, see where they traveled, even guess at whom they were dating.
> No disciplinary actions were taken against any employee of the federal government based on Yeagley’s presentation. His aim was to show that buried in the seemingly innocuous technical data that comes off every cell phone in the world is a rich story—one that people might prefer to keep quiet.
---
> Our real-world movement is highly specific and personal to all of us. For many years, I lived in a small 13-unit walk-up in Washington, DC. I was the only person waking up every morning at that address and going to The Wall Street Journal’s offices. Even if I was just an anonymized number, my behavior was as unique as a fingerprint even in a sea of hundreds of millions of others. There was no way to anonymize my identity in a data set like geolocation. Where a phone spends most of its evenings is a good proxy for where its owner lives. Advertisers know this. > >Governments know this too. And Yeagley was part of a team that would try to find out how they could exploit it.
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> PlanetRisk hired Yeagley in 2016 as vice president of global defense—essentially a sales and business development job. The aim was for him to develop his adtech technology inside the contractor, which might try to sell it to various government agencies. Yeagley brought with him some government funding from his relationships around town in the defense and intelligence research communities. > > PlanetRisk’s earliest sales demo was about Syria: quantifying the crush of refugees flowing out of Syria after years of civil war and the advancing ISIS forces. From a commercial data broker called UberMedia, PlanetRisk had obtained location data on Aleppo—the besieged Syrian city that had been at the center of some of the fiercest fighting between government forces and US-backed rebels. It was an experiment in understanding what was possible. Could you even obtain location information on mobile phones in Syria? Surely a war zone was no hot spot for mobile advertising. > > But to the company’s surprise, the answer was yes. There were 168,786 mobile devices present in the city of Aleppo in UberMedia’s data set, which measured mobile phone movements during the month of December 2015. And from that data, they could see the movement of refugees around the world. > > The discovery that there was extensive data in Syria was a watershed. No longer was advertising merely a way to sell products; it was a way to peer into the habits and routines of billions. “Mobile devices are the lifeline for everyone, even refugees,” Yeagley said.
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> They realized they could track world leaders through Locomotive, too. After acquiring a data set on Russia, the team realized they could track phones in the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s entourage. The phones moved everywhere that Putin did. They concluded the devices in question did not actually belong to Putin himself; Russian state security and counterintelligence were better than that. Instead, they believed the devices belonged to the drivers, the security personnel, the political aides, and other support staff around the Russian president; those people’s phones were trackable in the advertising data. As a result, PlanetRisk knew where Putin was going and who was in his entourage.
> Locomotive, the first version of which was coded in 2016, blew away Pentagon brass. One government official demanded midway through the demo that the rest of it be conducted inside a SCIF, a secure government facility where classified information could be discussed. The official didn’t understand how or what PlanetRisk was doing but assumed it must be a secret. A PlanetRisk employee at the briefing was mystified. “We were like, well, this is just stuff we’ve seen commercially,” they recall. “We just licensed the data.” After all, how could marketing data be classified?
> Locomotive was renamed VISR, which stood for Virtual Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance. It would be used as part of an interagency program and would be shared widely inside the US intelligence community as a tool to generate leads.
> But VISR, by now, is only one product among others that sell adtech data to intelligence agencies. The Department of Homeland Security has been a particularly enthusiastic adopter of this kind of data. Three of its components—US Customs and Border Protection, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the US Secret Service —have bought more than 200 licenses from commercial ad tech vendors since 2019. They would use this data for finding border tunnels, tracking down unauthorized immigrants, and trying to solve domestic crimes. In 2023, a government inspector general chastised DHS over the use of adtech, saying that the department did not have adequate privacy safeguards in place and recommending that the data stop being used until policies were drawn. The DHS told the inspector general that they would continue to use the data. Adtech “is an important mission contributor to the ICE investigative process as, in combination with other information and investigative methods, it can fill knowledge gaps and produce investigative leads that might otherwise remain hidden,” the agency wrote in response.
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> We all have a vague sense that our cell phone carriers have this data about us. But law enforcement generally needs to go get a court order to get that. And it takes evidence of a crime to get such an order. This is a different kind of privacy nightmare.
First the crazy: Alabama has been calling embryos and fetuses 'people' for a long time. The latest ruling says that even frozen embryos are 'people'. This ruling says:
> “We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness. It is as if the People of Alabama took what was spoken of the prophet Jeremiah and applied it to every unborn person in this state: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, Before you were born I sanctified you.’ Jeremiah 1:5 (NKJV 1982)”.
source: archive: https://archive.is/fBJnL | https://premierchristian.news/en/news/article/created-by-him-to-reflect-his-likeness-alabama-judge-quotes-bible-in-embryo-lawsuit-ruling
USA Today points to Gorsuch as opening the gates to highly religious rulings:
> The First Amendment's Establishment Clause typically limits the role religion can play in government, but the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 changed the longstanding process by which it reviewed conflicts between government and religion. The decision to change that process was written by Justice Gorsuch, who said the court needed to rely more heavily on "reference to historical practices and understandings." Parker, the Alabama judge, specifically referenced Gorsuch in his concurrent opinion.
source: archive: https://archive.is/cPjgw | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/02/22/ivf-opinion-from-alabama-justice-was-overtly-religious/72689378007/
Slate points out that by the Court's own logic, both the 'parents' and the clinic should be charged with murder (as well as the person who actually dropped the embryos).
source: archive: https://archive.is/7l3vx | https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/02/abortion-bans-alabamas-anti-ivf-ruling-fail.html
WITH ALL THAT:
Perhaps it is a good thing that the whole nation now has a reason to take a long hard look at what it means to be a 'person'. I've seen studies saying anywhere from 20%-60% of all pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion; most before the woman realizes she is pregnant. This paper says maybe as low as 10%, but only if you aren't paying attention: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5741961/ > The spontaneous miscarriage rate varies between from 10% to 20% where 10% refers to late recognition of pregnancy and 20% refers to research involving routinely testing for pregnancy before 4 weeks or 4 weeks after the last menstrual period
This chart says there's a 30% chance of miscarrying in the first week, with reduced risks after that: https://datayze.com/miscarriage-chart
Per Alabama, is God that invested in killing 'unborn' 'people'? Given how likely it is for an embryo to naturally abort, can we ever claim "beyond reasonable doubt" that a pregnancy was ever viable?
The above Slate piece suggests the unborn be treated as property. That might work for cells you want to keep, but note that there's a Supreme Court precedent that discarded cells are NOT a person's property and can be commercialized (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks#Consent_issues_and_privacy_concerns).
If we try to define when life begins, the Religious Right is sure to get deference. Look at how they've put "heartbeat bills" in place for embryos that don't HAVE HEARTS! Personally, I don't think setting a time constraint should be involved in defining life, but we're here to chat and discuss.
Lastly, CNN offered an opinion that we could choose to be more like South Korea which ruled (as summarized in Op-Ed): > If embryonic or fetal life has value, the state shouldn’t start with criminalization. Instead, the government may have a constitutional obligation to advance its interest in protecting that life in ways that don’t limit reproductive liberty, by protecting pregnant workers, delivering better prenatal care or safe housing and reducing the rate of maternal mortality.
source: archive: https://archive.is/GV0M0 | https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/21/opinions/alabama-supreme-court-fetal-embryo-personhood-abortion-ziegler/index.html
A relative wants to buy a wheelchair and I can tell there a lot to consider, but I'm having a hard time finding useful reviews of any model's actual usability, so I thought it'd be nice to get a discussion going on which chairs people loved, hated, or would otherwise like to rate. Is there something that is really great or really annoying about one?
A relative has late-ish stage pulmonary fibrosis, needs oxygen in bed, and can't walk around even with oxygen. He's getting kicked out of the hospital because they can't improve him, but he might live another year or two and doesn't want to pay for hospice. I can't imagine his wife dealing with all his needs (they're both in their 70s) but I've no idea if there are programs that get him care without leaving his wife destitute. They have a fair nest egg and own their house, but he doesn't want to 'waste' their money on health care. I kinda get it, but also: he needs care.
Anyone know of programs to look at? I'm looking for useful links, but I keep hitting things that either look scammy or like they won't apply (example: if he is deemed 'disabled', doesn't the govt. basically not care at all until you are broke?)
At posting, the verdict was not yet in, but there are plenty of groundhog stories, like:
> Far from celebrating groundhogs, New Hampshire once tried to eradicate them from the state via a short-lived but wildly successful bounty on their pelts. > >The state paid $12,206 in groundhog bounty claims for the fiscal year ending June 1885. At 10 cents per pelt, that amounted to more than 120,000 groundhogs — or woodchucks, as they were called then. > >The bounty, which was repealed soon after, was the result of a legislative committee appointed to study the critters. Their view was decidedly negative. > >Declaring the animals “not only a nuisance, but also a bore,” state Rep. Charles Corning called them “absolutely destitute of any interesting qualities” and “one of the worst enemies ever known to the farmer” in his 1883 “Report of the Woodchuck Committee.
These cosy, wardrobe-like pieces of furniture could reportedly sleep up to five people. Why did they fall out of fashion?
Short answer: it helped keep you warm.
-- but it is an interesting piece of cultural history and the article has nice images of such beds.
All six registered voters of Dixville Notch cast their ballots for Nikki Haley. The midnight voters were outnumbered more than 10 to one on Tuesday by reporters, not to mention by a pile of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.
> Dixville Notch has a tradition of first-in-the-nation voting that dates back to 1960, with the results announced just a few minutes after midnight.
the above is no longer true, but the town is still first in its state.
> With such a tiny sample of voters, the results are not typically indicative of how an election will end up. But they do provide for an early curiosity. > > The six registered voters of tiny Dixville Notch in New Hampshire all cast their ballots for Nikki Haley at midnight on Tuesday, giving her a clean sweep over former President Donald Trump and all the other candidates.
There were 4 republican and 2 independent voters. The latter could have chosen either republican or democratic ballots, but since the state is all in a tiff about not being the first primary anymore, the state kept Biden off the ballot (you could still write him in) and the TWO independent voters opted for the republican ballots where they chose Nikki.
> One striking discovery related to MS, a chronic disease of the brain and spinal cord that is considered an autoimmune disorder in which the body mistakenly attacks itself. > > The researchers identified a pivotal migration event about 5,000 years ago at the start of the Bronze Age when livestock herders called the Yamnaya people moved into Western Europe from an area that includes modern Ukraine and southern Russia. > > They carried genetic traits that at the time were beneficial, protective against infections that could arise from their sheep and cattle. As sanitary conditions improved over the millennia, these same variants increased MS risk.
links:
- archive of reuters piece: https://archive.ph/aXcpn
- more depth: https://phys.org/news/2024-01-ancient-human-dna-hints-multiple.html
- 50+ page paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.09.23.509097v1.full
Musician John Mayer joins Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen in CNN’s New Year’s Eve special from a Japanese cat bar.
I thought it was cute enough that if y'all hadn't seen it, you might enjoy it.
A Japan Airlines plane carrying hundreds of passengers burst into flames on landing at Tokyo’s Haneda airport on Tuesday after it was in collision with another aircraft involved in earthquake relief efforts.
>A Japan Airlines plane carrying hundreds of passengers burst into flames on landing at Tokyo’s Haneda airport on Tuesday after it was in collision with another aircraft involved in earthquake relief efforts. > >JAL flight 516 ignited after flying into Haneda from the northern Japanese city of Sapporo at 5:47 p.m. local time (3:47 a.m. ET) > >All crew members and passengers, including eight children under the age of two, were safely evacuated from the passenger plane, according to the airline. One person on the Coast Guard plane escaped, but five are unaccounted for.
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>The Japan Coast Guard (JCG) confirms to CNN that one of its aircraft, likely a fixed-wing MA722, collided with commercial flight 516 on the runway. > >A JCG spokesman told CNN that the JCG aircraft was headed from Haneda airport to a JCG airbase in Niigata prefecture to help with relief efforts following a 7.5-magnitude earthquake on Monday.
The National Labor Relations Board says the locations were closed because of union organizing, violating federal law.
There's contrasting reporting on this:
- Reuters piece: Starbucks did not use 'anti-union playbook' against employees - report
- versus
- NYT archive link: Federal Regulators Seek to Force Starbucks to Reopen 23 Stores
Reuters: > The inquiry conducted from July to September called on Starbucks to improve the way it engages with unionization and revise its Global Human Rights Statement, but said there were no sign that it interfered with the freedom of employees to unionize. > > "The assessment was direct and clear that while Starbucks has had no intention to deviate from the principles of freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining, there are things the company can, and should, do to improve its stated commitments," said Mellody Hobson, independent chair of Starbucks. > > The Starbucks Workers United union, which represents more than 9,000 employees at about 360 U.S. stores, said the report "acknowledges deep problems" in the company's response to unionization by workers. > > "If the company's efforts at dialogue over the last few days are sincere, we are ready to talk," the union said.
NYT: > The matter is scheduled to go before an administrative judge next summer unless Starbucks settles it earlier. In addition to asking the judge to order the stores reopened, the complaint wants employees to be compensated for the loss of earnings or benefits and for other costs they incurred as a result of the closures. > > “This complaint is the latest confirmation of Starbucks’ determination to illegally oppose workers’ organizing,” Mari Cosgrove, a Starbucks employee, said in a statement issued through a spokesperson for the union, Workers United. > > The new complaint was issued on the same day that Starbucks released a nonconfidential version of an outside assessment of whether its practices align with its stated commitment to labor rights. The company’s shareholders had voted to back the assessment in a nonbinding vote whose results were announced in March. > > The author of the report, Thomas M. Mackall, a former management-side lawyer and labor relations official at the food and facilities management company Sodexo, wrote that he “found no evidence of an ‘anti-union playbook’ or instructions or training about how to violate U.S. laws.”
I heard an argument that the night sky should be filled with starlight, but since it is not, we know the universe is continuing to expand. More than that, we can measure the movement of stars year over year to deduce speeds and distances to confirm an expanding universe, and we think it is at an accelerating rate, BUT: wouldn't the sky still be dark even if the universe was static or even contracting?
I mean, I go into the basement with a flashlight and it doesn't matter how long I have the flashlight on, the room never gets brighter. Yes, it might seem brighter if I shrunk the size of the room, but that has more to do with refraction than intensity. Do we suppose that when starlight hits the edge of the universe it bounces back rather than, say, continuing on or getting absorbed or some such? I suppose we know something about redshift of stars, and I imagine that if space itself was contracting, the existing light be compressed into itself, becoming brighter, but I don't know enough of the field to work it out. Given how much empty space there is compared to a relatively sparse smattering of stars, would nights really be brighter, would it be noticeable, and how would we know that it wasn't exactly like what we see?
archive link | Excerpt: > Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday threatened to prosecute any doctors involved in providing an emergency abortion to a woman, hours after she won a court order allowing her to obtain one for medical necessity. > Paxton said in a letter that the order by District Court Judge Maya Guerra Gamble in Austin did not shield doctors from prosecution under all of Texas's abortion laws, and that the woman, Kate Cox, had not shown she qualified for the medical exception to the state's abortion ban. > > Paxton said in a statement accompanying the letter that Guerra Gamble's order "will not insulate hospitals, doctors, or anyone else, from civil and criminal liability for violating Texas' abortion laws."
See also: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4349124-texas-ag-says-court-exemption-abortion-still-prosecutable/
More on Kate Cox: https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2023/12/07/who-is-kate-cox-texas-woman-allowed-to-abort-fetus-with-lethal-abnormality/