Lvxferre [he/him]

I have two chimps within, Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cigs, drink yerba, fling shit at each other, and devour the face of anyone who gets close to either.

They also devour my dreams.

  • 2 Posts
  • 478 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 12th, 2024

help-circle



  • Sentenced to Be a Hero: initially I thought “meh, yet another series where they fight the Maō”, but right in the first episode there was a “hero” stealing stuff, then I was like “well, this is going to be fun”. And as the series progressed I started genuinely enjoying its cynical and bitter tone.

    Mayonaka Punch: I didn’t bother with the series at the start of the season, because you can be pretty sure “arsehole influencer doing dumb shit” is not my cup of tea. But mid-season I got bored, gave it a try because I thought the vampire looked fun (and quickly noticed she was voiced by my favourite voice actress, Fairouz Ai), and really enjoyed it, because the interactions between characters were fun.



  • I’ve adopted a cat like this. Except she wasn’t simply thrown tomatoes at; she was pregnant, and had both maxilar and cranial fractures. (Dunno if it was an accident or someone beat her up. And she lost the litter.) She got no coffee/chocolate but at least a blanket, plenty food/water and humans to cuddle with.




  • To be clear, since the paper is a bit messy, here’s how they calculated a few variables.

    Handedness index, HI: pick an individual. Check how many of the tasks they completed with the right hand (R) vs. the left hand (L). Then plop it into the formula (R-L) / (R+L).

    So for example, if Alice used her right hand 60% of the time for any given task, R=0.6, L=0.4, HI(Alice) = (0.6-0.4)/(0.6+0.4) = +0.2.

    Now let’s say Bob used his right hand 20% of the time. HI(Bob) = (0.2-0.8)/(0.2+0.8) = -0.6. Note the sign matters.

    Mean handedness index, MHI: it’s mean, just like me. *ba dum tss* Just sum this stuff up and divide by the number of individuals. e.g. the MHI for the whole population of my example above would be (+0.2 -0.6)/2 = -0.2. So righties increase the score, lefties decrease it.

    Mean absolute handedness index, MABSHI: disregard signal, then mean. The MABSHI for the population above would be (|+0.2| + |-0.6|)/2 = (0.2+0.6)/2 = 0.4. So stronger preference towards one hand (whichever it is) raises the score.


    My personal take:

    They found correlation between brain size, arm:leg ratio, and handedness… and that’s it. The title implies a cause (“why”), and that it has to do with right handedness, but both things are AFAIR (as far as I read) absent.

    I think this is all a big red herring, mind you. We humans coördinate the usage of both our hands for a lot of tasks, where each hand performs a different movement:

    • swing hammer with one hand, guide the nail with the other
    • hold bow with one hand, pull the string and guide arrow with the other
    • hold the mayo jar with one hand, twist lid with the other
    • etc.

    you get the idea, right? I think handedness encourages this sort of coördination, and it’s essential for more complex tasks other primates don’t typically perform. As such I don’t think it’s necessarily correlated to every instance of tool usage, as in the TOOL variable, but to specific tasks.


  • And there lies the problem with just replacing cars with buses

    That’s not what I’m saying. I’m showing the idea in the OP (exclusive streets for “public” urban transport) is old as fuck and yet those money hoarders are reinventing it in a worse way. That’s it.

    If you want my actual take on what’s the “best”: I do not think replacing everything with buses is sensible. I think buses and metropolitan trains are a good backbone, but there should be a mix, including direct transportation (e.g. taxi, regardless of being self-driving or not).

    So congrats for building a straw man out of assumptions, and then beating it up. *yawn*

    Now factor in that most people are going to need a vehicle in the US […]

    Simply put, major bus network don’t work in most of the US […]

    Emphasis mine. I’m not from USA, this comm is not about USA, and I’m clearly talking in a country-agnostic way, even if the pic I shared happens to be from my country (and city).

    So, lemme be a wee bit blunt: why do you think I bloody care about USA enough to discuss the particularities of transport there? I don’t.

    If USA or Kazakhstan or Nigeria or France or whatever have additional challenges against sane public transport, this perhaps warrants its own discussion thread. But it’s certainly not an excuse to narrow a discussion down from “everybody should be able to chime in” into “HOW DO PEOPLE DARE TO NOT TALK ABOUT MY COUNTRY?”, okay?

    Not further wasting my time with you.


  • It depends on how wide or narrow you define “same place”.

    If “same place” is “same neighbourhood, at walking distance”, and one of the neighbourhoods is downtown, then it’s quite a bit.

    Plus buses are not restricted to two stations. And changing buses in the middle of your path is feasible, as long as the system is designed for that.


  • Let’s go further:

    1. Make streets for self-driving cars.
    2. Make the self-driving cars hold a lot more people. Like, a fuckload more.
    3. Since self-driving is unreliable, put actual drivers in them. Due to #2 it won’t be a big cost.

    And…

    That’s exactly what my city implemented in the 90s.

    Those sociopathic money hoarders are desperate to reinvent the wheel, and everything else on it.



  • IMO the most important part of learning fallacies is not to call them by name while debating. It’s to smell the bullshit from a distance. Both in the others’ reasoning and your own.

    That’s what those Reddit kids are missing. This shit is not an “I won!” card. It’s a reasoning framework.

    (Sometimes I do still call them out by name. But that’s usually a sign I’m already losing my patience with the muppet in question, and considering to block them [online] / turn 180° [offline] while saying “I’m not wasting my time further with you and your dumb shit”.

    I don’t debate religion any more, though; unlike in my later teens + early twenties. Zealots get mentally tagged “irrational harmful avoid”, and the sort of person who believes with the brain but not the liver isn’t usually a problem.)


  • highly corrosive and combustible chemical or go without their key ingredient.

    Sulphuric acid is not combustible. I can go into details if anyone wants, but it’s mostly a fire hazard near most metals and burnable substances. This matters because, as long as properly stored, it offers no risk of fire, and proper storage isn’t hard to achieve. (e.g. carbon steel tanks if concentrated past 93%).

    And this shit goes every fucking where, from copper ore treatment to organic synthesis to fertiliser production. You can get a pretty good guess of the industrial capabilities of a place based on their sulphuric acid production. As such it’s no surprise China is banning exports.

    Relevant to note sulphuric acid is typically made from sulphur, and sulphur is typically obtained from petroleum and/or natural gas. That’s why the supply has become problematic.






  • What’s shown in the picture is fairly solid, to be honest. The vowels remind me Italian (four heights) meets German (front unrounded vs. front rounded vs. back rounded).

    /ʁ/ is being listed twice; is this an accident? Or is the consonant playing double role, as both the voiced counterpart for /x/ and as a liquid?

    Vowel romanisation is a bit weird but eh, kind of tricky to do this anyway. I typically reserve letters otherwise associated with consonants for this reason; e.g. ⟨w y v⟩. But in your case it would require a lot of respelling.

    Props for using a diaeresis instead of umlaut. It’s the best approach in this case, umlaut tends to create too much diacritic spam.

    Main thing missing from the phonotactics are assimilation rules; for example languages typically don’t allow stuff like /np/ or /mt/, even if otherwise allowed. I also think it’s a bit strange to allow coda stops but not coda fricatives, but that might be due to “stereotypical Romance” bias from my part.

    I forgot to add that end vowels fall silent when an apostrophe comes before them, technically “KHngoiengngņgöiëxuh’í” /xŋœŋŋngoieʃə/ is completely legal

    Did you review the conlang in the meantime? Because the pic says nothing about apostrophes, and /xŋ/ doesn’t seem to be a valid onset in the list.