Blondə

Come on Brian, cheer up!

I mean, what have you got to lose? You know, you come from nothing You’re going back to nothing What have you lost? Nothing!

Always look on the bright side of life!

There are certainly a lot of species that live in what we might consider inhospitable conditions, and there have been massive ecosystem and environmental shifts in the history of life on earth.

However, the chemistries and conditions needed to form macromolecules and lipid globules that could protect and contain them (which is one candidate for proto-life) might not have that full range of adaptability. Keeping chemical integrity in potentially harsh conditions (in terms of temperature or environmental chemistry) depends on a whole cascade of cellular chemistry that’s unavailable to proto-cells.

Finding even a single example of extraterrestrial life - even bacterial mats - would absolutely revolutionize biology, and I hope we manage to do it, especially if I’m still around to see it.

I’d probably blame regulatory capture as a whole than individual regs and agencies, but I agree. My feeling is that if you’re going to make a fuel efficiency regulation and then allow exceptions, they should be exceptions based on use, not based on class of vehicle. There should probably be additional fees/taxes, maybe applied annually.

Otherwise, yeah, the incentives point in the wrong direction.

Pickups today are huge monstrosities but I swear their beds are about as long as the one I had in my 1987 Ranger. When I did get a full sized truck, it had a longer bed because if you can’t carry standard sized plywood, sheetrock, and lumber, I’m not sure I’d want it.

I’m going to hazard a guess it’s a combination of falling budget and an over reliance on autocorrect. If it’s like other industries, they’re trying to get more articles out with fewer people.

I know that I often have an atrocious number of typos - but some are entirely the fault of autocorrect either changing a correct word to something else or correcting a typo to a word that makes no sense in the context of the sentence. I’m hoping that the next generation will improve this.

If anything a now - not typo at least indicates that it was written by a human. LLM errors generally don’t involve that sort of thing.

I had a sociologist once tell me that one of the reasons people will say that a baby looks like their father so often is that it is a social affirmation of paternity. Eventually the kid will (probably) start to resemble their relatives, but early on I think it’s mostly just being social.

Seventeen is also easier to fit into lyrics. Dancing Queen by ABBA. Sexy + 17 by the Stray Cats (although the song was about ditching high school classes). At Seventeen by Janis Ian (who was singing about herself at 17). Paradise by the Dashboard Light by Meatloaf (again about both being high schoolers, but he’s a bit of a creep anyway).

I might be giving my age away here.

This is something that the CIA actively engages in. It’s not quite at the covfefe level of “we meant to get caught,” but they do occasionally put out the word that they like it when they’re perceived as ham-fisted bunglers as it makes it easier to get away with stuff.

I have never seen a chain letter referred to as “chainmail” and I don’t know how to feel about it.

That’s pretty much what all of the site aggregators were. I ran a couple of communities on yahoo and some other sites. There were also services like Archie, gopher, and wais, and I am pretty sure my Usenet client had some searching on it (it might have been emacs - I can’t remember anymore). I remember when Google debuted on Stanford.edu/google and realized that everything was about to change.

No, because he’s actually quite mad and belongs nowhere near any kind of power. I can see his conspiracy theories appealing to the Q type, but most of them are going to go for Trump. He’s polling this highly because he’s an unknown. As more people start paying attention to who he actually is, he will be the Herman Cain of the race.

The Kids Who Lived.

You’re right, but it depends on how you want to think about it. They’re not necessarily graded on a curve, but with standardized tests you usually have both a history and a design target. They’re intended to produce (for example) a normal curve with a specific mean (eg mean IQ = 100) and they’ll adjust the test year over year to keep within those bounds. In other words, the grades don’t change but the test does.

Curves exist because failing 90% of your class is a really bad look.

I’ve been graded on a curve, and I’ve done it myself a couple of times. IMO, it’s usually a sign of a bad class (too much material being crammed in) or a bad teacher (didn’t get the concepts across to the majority of the students).

That said, it’s usually done when it’s needed to prevent a significant portion of the class from failing. I remember a chem exam I took where a 16/100 was a C.

The basic idea is that grades are normally distributed (ie a bell curve) which allows you to find the average grade range and shift the letter grade (eg a C or C+). There’s some professors who take the idea too far and rather than working off of an actual normal distribution try to fit the procedure to a simply skewed distribution or use it to pull down an 85/100 to a C, but in my experience that’s the exception to the rule, especially in math/science courses.

Also, iirc this is a parody account.

I do this for a living. Seasonality as a generic term refers to temporally periodic signals but can even be extended to talk about non-temporal aspects of a signal. The same math used in areas like econometrics to remove periodicity in annual data can be applied to multiple domains. The main motivation to removing or isolating periodicity is to allow for investigation into the underlying phenomena, or to allow the investigation of the sources of periodicity independently of other drivers. In every case, though, seasonality is an acceptable term in everything I’ve written, read, and worked on.

This is seasonality.

Seasonality is a characteristic of a time series and refers to periodic and generally regular and predictable changes that occur over a year.

To make it more generic, drop the “over a year” and just refer to the periodic signal over time idea. You can find additional signals by how you bin the data, eg monthly or day of week.

He went from looking like The Mandarin from Iron Man to wish.com late stage Tyrion.

Probabilistic curves are pretty much the opposite of what we normally mean when we say “free will.” Of the assumptions were correct, we’d tend to use the term “non-deterministic.”

I tend to lean in the direction of Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky who believes that it is deterministic but not predictable due to the complexity of the parts and their interactions.

This is known as the Whorfian Hypothesis, aka Sapir-Whorf theory. In generalized-to-the-point-of-inaccuracy terms, the idea is that language constrains thought. It’s one of those ideas that we can perceive as intuitively correct but that does not stand up to experiment.

There are, for example, languages that don’t have words differentiating green and blue, and others whose counting numbers don’t include specific words for numbers larger than two. Some languages have no words for cardinal directions but use terms like “mountain-way” and “ocean-way.”

Experiments do seem to support a weak version of Whorf - people from cultures with “missing” words can differentiate between green and blue for instance, but it seems to take a bit longer. There’s also a paper indicating that people who don’t use cardinal coordinates have a better innate sense of orientation when, eg, walking corridors in an enclosed building.

I’d personally fall between the weak and strong position because I do not believe in free will and do believe that semantics are a significant driver of behavior, but that’s a step beyond where most of the current research is. There’s research into free will, but none that I’m aware of that pulls in cognitive semantics as a driver.