Ben Webster
3.9K posts
@TimHenke9 @bwebste I’ve always assumed it’s New York, NJ and whatever’s close by but tbh I’ve never confirmed this suspicion
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Could someone steelman the idea that self-plaigarism is bad? I cannot understand why academics must not write the same thing twice.
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@DiracDeltaFunk I mean, I think you are taking this too literally; it’s normal to copy definitions to make sure you don’t mess them up. But, if there's literally no change you want to make, you should just cite the other paper.
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I already wrote such an intro for Paper A, and actually I did the best job I could back then! There is ~no room for improvement imo. But I need to write something new for Paper B, and as a result the intro to Paper B is literally less good than the intro to Paper A.
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Feel old yet? People born after 9/11 are having their first midlife crises
Huzaifa@notrlly_huzaifa
one thing they dont tell u abt turning 23 is that suddenly its too late for everything. too late to pursue ur dreams, too late to take those risks, too late to be in love, too late to for quite literally everything. life ends at 22 and ure only left with regrets and longings
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@miclugo @NoahJSnyder It's suddenly become strategically important because if Harris wins PA, MI and WI, but loses AZ, NV, GA, and NE-2, then it's an electoral college tie.
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@NoahJSnyder I didn’t realize NE-2 was that far left! Thanks for the correction.
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Nebraska? Are they making a play for Omaha?
Nidia@NidiaCavazosTV
NEW: VP Harris and Gov. Walz will barnstorm battleground states, following Tuesday’s presidential debate, kicking off their ‘New Way Forward’ tour. Thursday: Harris in NC, Walz in MI. Friday: Harris in PA, Walz in MI, WI. With this, the campaign is releasing their latest ad: “New Way Forward” set to air across battleground states and Nebraska. m.youtube.com/watch?v=hKSXd8…
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Emblematic of this is that 2008 was the only competitive presidential primary where I voted for the winner.
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I'm not that invested in the specific argument here, but it got me thinking about how weird the 2008 primary was. We've never actually had another primary that competitive in the post-'68 system. What other election would give you a map like this?
Noah Snyder@NoahJSnyder
@firasd @mattyglesias Whereas with her Iraq positioning, absolutely not. And it’s why I didn’t vote for her in the 2016 primary, even though there I didn’t particularly like the other candidate.
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@NoahJSnyder @firasd @mattyglesias It’s easy to forget now how deeply liberals despised Bush by 2007. Clinton’s vote for the war tied her inextricably to the most salient reason for that.
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@NoahJSnyder @firasd @mattyglesias It also gave Obama a specific issue where he could differentiate himself from Clinton. It was key to his ability to attract attention, and all the things that flow from that (money, volunteers), even if that specific issue didn’t move *that* many people.
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@LibWanderer @mnolangray @StatisticUrban Um, except for Canada, which is the most culturally similar to the US (Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are all similar to London).
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@mnolangray @StatisticUrban We're normal for the Americas!
The Western Hemisphere is just gratuitously violent.
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@TimHenke9 @heuristics @focusfronting The capitals give it feeling of Seriousness, and it has some familiar English features (using “ck”, writing “ie” instead of final “i”, no diacritics or weird things like “ij”). The number of j’s is probably a key reason Dutch looks strange.
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@bwebste @heuristics @focusfronting Yeah the fact that nobody has this with German is really interesting, in fairness
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@TimHenke9 @heuristics @focusfronting Right, I mean the point I was making was about spelling anyways. Something about the conventions in those languages that make them look kind of funny to English eyes in a way that, say, German doesn’t.
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@heuristics @bwebste @focusfronting Just to clarify: Dutch is not a Scandinavian language. Those were descended from Old Norse, while Dutch and English were both descended from Proto West Germanic
But of course even with the more distant common ancestor the same effect persists a little bit
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@TimHenke9 @focusfronting This is hard to explain, but something about the spelling of Dutch (and Skandanavian languages) just looks silly or childish to English speakers. The fact that words in those languages often look like badly spelled English words is definitely partly why.
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@focusfronting My theory is that Dutch is simply the closest non-intelligible relative of English that most speakers will encounter so everything will seem slightly off or invoke incorrect associations
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@PowerStiering @StatisticUrban It also doesn't account for what the "uncomfortable" days are like. At least for some of us, uncomfortably cold is much more bearable than uncomfortably hot (essentially because of the second law of thermodynamics).
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@PowerStiering @StatisticUrban The dewpoint setting is way too strict here; the Midwest has a lot of summer days which are perfectly pleasant, but maybe a little muggy by CA standards and this marks them as "uncomfortable."
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@TimHenke9 @eigenknight Another way to say the same thing is that [1:z] and [z;1] are copes of C=R^2, and they are glued together by the map z-> 1/z, so it’s gluing two disks to make an S^2.
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@eigenknight Yes! ℂℙ¹ is given by complex numbers [a:b] up to simultaneous scaling
There are only two free choices: the relative phase and the ratio |a|/|b|
The phase lies on S¹ and the ratio in the closed interval [0,∞]
This means we get a closed cylinder w/ the ends pinched: a sphere
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Why is ℂℙ¹ diffeomorphic to S²? Is there a straightforward way to see this?
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@rob_heighton there's only one Robin Hood and he is a fox
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Eight-year-old me watching the action scenes in BBC Robin Hood
Science girl@sciencegirl
Gymnastics is far too exciting
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@Quasilocal It’s actually gotten much worse. I’m the third result that’s an actual webpage, but there’s a bunch of non-webpage stuff mixed in:
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@Quasilocal Depends a lot on how common your name is. This is the first thing I see when I Google myself.
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I reckon if you're Googleable at all then the algorithm already knows you're Googling your own name and serves it up first to stroke your ego
Janet A. Carr@janetacarr
Go Google your name. If you're not the top result, you have work to do. Especially if you're giving conference talks or whatever.
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