sick hydrophobia[,] dog

a psa sign in my vet informs me that the German word for rabies is “tollwut,” which to my nonnative eye reads as “excellent fury”

high-concept anti-game idea: Space Probe Simulator. you must design, program, and launch a space probe to the outer solar system using 1960s technology. after launch, at appropriate intervals of years, systems may randomly start to fail; you must reprogram the probe to keep the whole thing working. there is no reloading old saves: if you fuck up and brick your probe, you must start again.

oh and the whole thing plays out in real time. including both round trip communication time and travel time.

a psa sign in my vet informs me that the German word for rabies is “tollwut,” which to my nonnative eye reads as “excellent fury”

the religious dynamic in haiti as described in metraux (so this is in the 40s i believe) is very strange. there's voodoo, catholicism, and protestantism. most people are both catholics and voodooists. in fact, catholic rites have all sorts of special powers in voodoo, a voodo priest might have a lapsed catholic who knows enough latin or french for the proper prayers do rites at the voodoo temple, etc. the catholic church alternately ignores this or has huge violent campaigns against it. the latter seem to work temporarily but the voodoo grows back

anyway protestantism on the other hand is strictly opposed to voodoo, but in like...a voodoo-believing way? "the loa dont exist" doesnt seem to be a major position among any group. the catholics say the loa are demons, some of the voodoo catholics agree loa are fallen angels but think this is fine (god made them! theyre close to us than normal angels!), and many people convert to protestantism specifically because they want the immunity to the loa that protestantism grants (for example, if theyre very sick or have been very unfortunate, and believe these are caused by the loa). the latter though shades into leaving voodooism because it can be an expensive religion (sacrifices, etc)

I think Christianity has a (not always centered depending on the strain) current where the ideal is celibacy, all sex is gross and dirty, it’s just that sex within marriage is tolerated if you horny perverts really can’t hack total celibacy. Paul is certainly big on that. And the shakers and the skoptsy and other Christian sects tended to revive that ideal from time to time.

Whereas iirc in Buddhism the idea is like. There’s a phase of life to which having a family is appropriate, and then later in life you go out and find enlightenment or w/e? And losing all attachment to earthly desires naturally means you stop fucking, but sex is not *worse* than other earthly desires?

Anyway why are religions so effin weird abt sex

irrationally irritated by this post. the buddha didnt fuck after enlightenment!!! i mean, probably. who knows what the deal was with the historical buddha. but like. traditional buddhism is not exactly a sex-positive religion. i mean. its DIFFERENTLY weird about sex than christianity. but i wouldnt really say its more okay with sex than christianity (even christianity is very pro-sex within marriage!). also i mean. jesus maybe fucked.

No--I actually find geacron extremely lackluster for what it purports to be. The EU4 map is more detailed in many respects, even though it is presented in a much less flexible format.

While I understand why, it’s a pity Paradox will never do anything like EU4’s start date system again, because I remember downloading that game and being delighted just to have a world map I could scroll through by date and watch borders change. Even as a limited, gamified world map, being able to take in a global view of different historical eras is super cool if you just don’t have a lot of context for some eras in some regions.

There’s that guy on Wikipedia who does those schematic historical maps, but they’re a lot less detailed and at much broader intervals unfortunately.

my most crank opinion is that microplastics literally do not matter as a health concern bc by definition they're inert. they're an ecological concern, yeah. i helped my mom with a little lit review and the general vibe is like, well they could theoretically be a vector by which dangerous things like pathogens or heavy metals or chemical compounds could come in your body but they're just hanging out there. and given that heavy metals are still being found in all kinds of food everywhere in the world, public health has to chase that.

so if i am understanding this correctly, the argument is that round about 2019 somebody decided the best way to measure how well google search was doing was by absolute number of queries, and a lot of subsequent changes were made to google that were aimed at increasing that number. which had the effect of making google search suck more, because that meant people had to work harder to find stuff, which increased the amount of absolute searches people were doing. because, you know. it was harder to find stuff.

A day later, Gomes emailed Fox and Thakur an email he intended to send to Raghavan. He led by saying he was “annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.” in a long email, he explained how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically added that they could “increase queries quite easily in the short term in user negative ways,” like turning off spell correction, turning off ranking improvements, or placing refinements — effectively labels — all over the page, adding that it was “possible that there are trade offs here between different kinds of user negativity caused by engagement hacking,” and that he was “deeply deeply uncomfortable with this.” He also added that this was the reason he didn’t believe that queries were a good metric to measure search and that the best defense about the weakness of queries was to create “compelling user experiences that make users want to come back.” In the March 2019 core update to search, which happened about a week before the end of the code yellow, was expected to be “one of the largest updates to search in a very long time. Yet when it launched, many found that the update mostly rolled back changes, and traffic was increasing to sites that had previously been suppressed by Google Search’s “Penguin” update from 2012 that specifically targeted spammy search results, as well as those hit by an update from an August 1, 2018, a few months after Gomes became Head of Search. While I’m guessing, the timing of the March 2019 core update, along with the traffic increases to previously-suppressed sites, heavily suggests that Google’s response to the Code Yellow was to roll back changes that were made to maintain the quality of search results.

which seems like a pretty plausible, if stupid, way to fuck up your product!

art about horses

yeah this whole "nothing matters, nothing anyone can ever do would help save some kind of forever-out-of-reach revolution that's never going to happen" doomerism is reactionary. like i don't care what your theoretical underlying values are, if you act like this you are, in terms of the actual political effect you have on the world, functioning as a far-right nihilist.

this is so funny I cannot believe this was posted

I will always have a special place in my heart for the Paradox games, because I was able to ace a couple of geography exams without studying just by thinking back and remembering cities and regions in the context of e.g. "the 1936 Soviet invasion of Turkey."

the one pitfall is sometimes you remember the wrong name for a place: bratislava hasn't been called "pozsony" or "pressburg" in quite a while!

Re: how many copies of a book are sold in a year: this article makes the point that it is very easy to use these statistics in a misleading way if you are (say) a publisher who wants to portray themselves as Just A Little Guy to the DOJ, or if you don’t have a detailed breakdown of what publishing statistics represent.

There was one furry character in the story, but she wasn’t representative of the cat goddess’s followers as a whole. Link to the story.

(It is objectively not a great piece of fiction—both in prose and ideas kind of sophomoric. Also too long, and none of the characters are particularly believable. But narrative fiction was never OA’s strong suit; the encyclopedia-style material is way more interesting to me.)

The lack of connection between disparate parts can be a weakness in collaborative fiction for sure; it works a little better in OA in that the encyclopedia covers a huge volume of space, at a pretty general level of detail, but it’s also just a problem of being a smaller project. The bigger the project the more people you have going back and filling in detail, the kind of thing that helps everything feel connected.

reading about speculative biology on the orion's arm site always makes me feel good about being made of ordinary matter. like sure, most of the universe is pretty inhospitable to us, but it's not so inhospitable that literally all of the matter that makes up our everyday environment would explode or dissolve if exposed to space. if you're made of neutronium or magnetic field lines or w/e, not only can you not exist outside your native environment (true of us also), but you can't even build anything that could exist outside your native environment. anything you could make a space probe out of (if you could even launch it from your gravity well somehow) would abruptly cease to exist if it actually reached space. you'd have to build some kind of rube goldberg chain of machines to even reach orbit. whereas we, lucky apes that we are, only have to put a capsule on a rocket and chuck it into space. the vacuum is only 1 atmosphere more pressure than we live at every day--practically a sunny summer day compared to trying to exist on the surface of a neutron star!

the little magnetic monopole guys are slightly more fortunate in this regard, but they still can accidentally create black holes by slight overcrowding, which seems very less than ideal. somebody needs to come up with some kind of very diaphanous organism that can only exist in a near-vacuum. though i suspect such a creature would have to be so large that it would barely hold together in the first place.

“Catgirl” seems like a weird way of describing a lovecraftian nightmare that results from a cat being elevated from a subsapient creature past multiple informational-processing singularities to an effective god while having its form mutated into something vast and incomprehensible.

But yeah, of course it still has that.

reading about speculative biology on the orion's arm site always makes me feel good about being made of ordinary matter. like sure, most of the universe is pretty inhospitable to us, but it's not so inhospitable that literally all of the matter that makes up our everyday environment would explode or dissolve if exposed to space. if you're made of neutronium or magnetic field lines or w/e, not only can you not exist outside your native environment (true of us also), but you can't even build anything that could exist outside your native environment. anything you could make a space probe out of (if you could even launch it from your gravity well somehow) would abruptly cease to exist if it actually reached space. you'd have to build some kind of rube goldberg chain of machines to even reach orbit. whereas we, lucky apes that we are, only have to put a capsule on a rocket and chuck it into space. the vacuum is only 1 atmosphere more pressure than we live at every day--practically a sunny summer day compared to trying to exist on the surface of a neutron star!

the little magnetic monopole guys are slightly more fortunate in this regard, but they still can accidentally create black holes by slight overcrowding, which seems very less than ideal. somebody needs to come up with some kind of very diaphanous organism that can only exist in a near-vacuum. though i suspect such a creature would have to be so large that it would barely hold together in the first place.

Collaborative fiction projects are definitely A Thing. Compare the SCP stuff. Different genres of fiction for sure, with different presentations (and SCP is way bigger), but I think they’re a similar kind of project.

reading about speculative biology on the orion's arm site always makes me feel good about being made of ordinary matter. like sure, most of the universe is pretty inhospitable to us, but it's not so inhospitable that literally all of the matter that makes up our everyday environment would explode or dissolve if exposed to space. if you're made of neutronium or magnetic field lines or w/e, not only can you not exist outside your native environment (true of us also), but you can't even build anything that could exist outside your native environment. anything you could make a space probe out of (if you could even launch it from your gravity well somehow) would abruptly cease to exist if it actually reached space. you'd have to build some kind of rube goldberg chain of machines to even reach orbit. whereas we, lucky apes that we are, only have to put a capsule on a rocket and chuck it into space. the vacuum is only 1 atmosphere more pressure than we live at every day--practically a sunny summer day compared to trying to exist on the surface of a neutron star!

the little magnetic monopole guys are slightly more fortunate in this regard, but they still can accidentally create black holes by slight overcrowding, which seems very less than ideal. somebody needs to come up with some kind of very diaphanous organism that can only exist in a near-vacuum. though i suspect such a creature would have to be so large that it would barely hold together in the first place.

Deeply dispiriting post: testimony from a DOJ antitrust action reveals the entire book publishing industry is celebrity memoirs, established franchise authors like James Patterson, children's books, Bibles, and back catalogues (e.g. Lord of the Rings). Publishing new authors is not even a rounding error; you get the sense it's only done anymore out of a vague sense of obligation, and the moment one of the Big Five decides on the defect strategy, and stops doing that to save a few more bucks, it will end entirely.

In my new report, I provide the first ever look inside of a US military program known as the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows (SDEF) program, which gives major government contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing a way to influence senior military policymakers.

The program sends US military officers to work at major corporations for nearly a year; when they return, the fellows submit recommendations for reform of the Pentagon based on their observations of the private sector. 

We document numerous examples of companies using this program to pass along self-interested policy recommendations to US military leaders, including: more outsourcing, corporate subsidies, deregulation, less oversight, more political power to contractors, looser arms export rules, and more. We also analyzed a sample of former SDEF fellows and found that 43% of them go through the revolving door and work for military contractors after leaving the program. As such, the SDEF program uses government money to help subsidize the military-industrial complex, placing corporate interests above the public interest.

You can read my summary of the report here, along with coverage by The Lever here.