@eEqualsMCEscher @HimChatt I agree with your point – and there are certainly many such examples in heavy metal and other music genres – though a good number of heavy-metal musicians are also very good at what they do.
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Magnus Borgh
18.5K posts
Magnus Borgh
@SpinVector
Associate Professor of physics (AMO, quantum fluids), keeper of parrots, lover of classical music, and wearer of hats. English & Swedish.
Norwich, England Katılım Mayıs 2011
1.5K Takip Edilen950 Takipçiler
@SpinVector @HimChatt I think of the heavy metal guitar heroes (whose technique, incidentally, is roughly equivalent to that of a last-chair second violinist in a good orchestra) and their endless stream of super-fast notes in which not a single note actually matters.
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If only Henry James had been on a creative writing course! They probably didn’t have any back then, poor dear.
Chris Arnade 🐢🐱🚌@Chris_arnade
Started reading a Henry James book (Ambassadors) and he uses absurdly complex sentences to describe the simplest things, without anything gained beyond confusion. They aren't even lyrical, and often outright clunky.
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@SpinVector @eEqualsMCEscher Sure. Any style can be done well, or done badly.
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@HimChatt @eEqualsMCEscher It is nonsense, of course. But equally, complex isn’t inherently better either, even if that too seems to impress a lot of people.
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@eEqualsMCEscher I'm actually OK with plain, simple prose if done well, but there does seem to be a widespread belief that "simpler" is necessarily better, & that seems to me nonsense.
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@peterrhague I don’t really see those incentive structures. I see many complex reasons AC is not common – including the fact that it is only very recently that there has been any real need – but I’m not sure how it’s disincentivised. The AC is morally bad cult is surely a small minority.
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@SpinVector It’s not legally forbidden - but it is discouraged by various incentive structures. It’s socially forbidden for people who think we must bake ourselves for Gaia to atone for climate sins
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We inflicted a 9/11 worth of deaths on ourselves because of an eco-Calvinist ideology that forbids people from cooling down their houses with technology over a century old.
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Magnus Borgh retweetledi
Students like this warm my heart. It’s effortless to be dishonest, and yet they make an honest effort anyways!
Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan on 🟦☁️)@BrendanNyhan
Friends don't let friends continue to give exams and papers that are not adapted to the current AI landscape (this is AFTER 27 bailed so the reality is even worse) PS Props to students 1, 22, and 31
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@seenloitering @nguyenhdi This! Plus the character sheet is for *you* not what you present to the audience (reader/other players). An author who presents me with a character presentation that reads like a character sheet for no reason gets a dnf fast – and I rarely dnf.
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@nguyenhdi The idea that you can't understand a character if you don't know their star sign is pretty funny; but it's even funnier that most role-playing character sheets don't actually have a field for a character's birthday or star sign.
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@CburgesCliff @TSHamiltonAstro I’ve told the story before about how an example integral came out to be 42 and I made the obvious joke and was met with blank faces. I told the students I was disappointed no one reads the classics anymore. That was probably around 8 years ago now.
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@TSHamiltonAstro I know right? The young people of today are missing out on the classics 😁
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I remember teaching the topic of impulse in first year physics, prefaced by telling them that it wasn’t that useful a concept but I teach it in case you meet it as a Jeopardy question.
The class spontaneously started humming the Jeopardy jingle. Nowadays my TV references don’t strike similar chords 😥
Neil Renic@NC_Renic
“I’m not a regular lecturer; I’m a cool lecturer,” you tell yourself, as you reference another tv show cancelled before your students were born.
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@hairygit Yeah, no disagreement there! I think very few major cities that lack things to do to fill a week, but I can think of some where filling a full week or more might be too exhausting to enjoy it (neither Rome nor London are on that list).
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@SpinVector Yes, I take your point, but the idea of exhausting a city such as Rome or London in a mere seven days, even as a tourist, does have me raising my eyebrows (as that’s as far as I go in expressing extreme surprise and incredulity!😀)
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I have spent some 37 years now on the edge of, or just outside, London, and I am nowhere near tiring of it. Of other cities I have visited, I imagine I could happily spend my entire life in, say, Rome, Florence, Venice, Istanbul, and, were it not for the extreme heat, Delhi.
Jacob Shell@JacobAShell
If you look at world cities in terms of "as a tourist there, how many days could I fill with interesting things to do before I got a little bored?" (London and Rome are 7 days each, NYC and Paris are 6, and so forth), the fact is no Asian megacity is better than 2.5 days.
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No it doesn’t. And no it doesn’t.
Both statements here are false. First, entropy is not the same as disorder. Second, the Clausius theorem applies to a closed system. It’s perfectly consistent with the 2nd law to decrease entropy locally by expending energy, which life does.
Institute of Art and Ideas@IAI_TV
The second law of thermodynamics says disorder always increases. But life defies this by creating order. | bit.ly/4ggDAZ7 Philosopher Dorothea Olkowski draws on Ilya Prigogine's work to ask whether the classical version of the law ever described the reality of life at all.
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@AstroMikeMerri Yes, the Laffer Curve is so oversimplified a model as to be useless except for this trivial point. So it’s misused by one side as you describe, and its (correct) rejection is misused by the other to (incorrectly) imply that dynamic effects can never exist.
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The Laffer Curve is often misrepresented as claiming lower taxes increase tax revenue. In reality, it just makes the fairly trivial point that you get no revenue at tax rates of 0% or 100%, so the optimum is somewhere in between.
Little evidence as to where that optimum is…
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@cmonjussthetip @hope_in_light @martinmbauer No, not really. Had the kg been defined differently, the mole would have simply been taken as a different no. of grams that have a similarly convenient amount of substance. There’s no reason to believe 1 mol would have been taken substantially differently with a different kg.
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@hope_in_light @martinmbauer That's only because we defined the kilogram a certain way.
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The anthropic explanation is that humans invented Avogadro’s number. It’s like saying there is an approximate numerical coincidence between the number of days in a week and the number of planets in the solar system
Anders Sandberg@anderssandberg
Sean Carroll asked if there is an anthropic explanation for the approximate numerical coincidence between Avogadro's Number and the number of stars in the observable universe. Turns out there isn't, really!
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@peterrhague What are those odd opinions and where did he express them? I’m coming up empty here …
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If anybody concerned about the King’s somewhat odd opinions about what his job should be is holding out hope for William, bear in mind he was tutored by Rory Stewart at one point…
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@peterrhague Sine when is ”Europe” (what entity, precisely?) starting to ban AC? Let’s start by establishing whether the base claim is even true, yes?
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I think 2 is a lot more likely than 1. Old people are a reliable voting base, the establishment aren’t trying to off them
DC_Draino@DC_Draino
Europe is starting to ban A/C for 2 reasons: 1. To kill old people with heat stroke who use up all the tax dollars in socialized medicine. 2. To make everyone feel hot and miserable so the “global warming” scam feels more real and they can pass more tax increases. These globalist elites are truly evil.
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Cringe.
I looked it up & here's some more from Maria Dahvana Headly's translation of "Beowulf".
Sylvian (#1 Skinamarink Fan)@TheAlexSylvian
this thing rules
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@nguyenhdi > It does annoy me when diacritics are treated as if they have no meaning and can be strewn about or skipped willy-nilly. (The heavy-metal umlaut gets an exception for having a genuine subcultural history.)
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@nguyenhdi Swedish has nowhere near the number of diacritics of Vietnamese but we do have the letters åäö plus accents. I’m with you here: it doesn’t particularly bother me when skipped for obvious convenience/unavailable on keyboard. >
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A bit of a tangent: I'm suppose I'm quite loose about diacritics in other languages (say, ë in Brontë) because Vietnamese has lots of diacritics (6 tones, 7 extra letters). We're used to removing diacritics when writing in other languages (e.g. my name is Hải Di, not Hai Di).
Rachel Moiselle@RachelMoiselle
Recent conversations on this app about Austen’s Persuasion and the 1995 adaptation with Ciarán Hinds has reminded me that most non-Irish people fail to use a fada (accent) on Irish names. Ciarán should not be spelled Ciaran, it is incorrect. The fada is not an accessory, it serves a necessary function of elongating the vowel. Án is pronounced like ‘awn’, without the fada it is just ‘un’. Use the fada please!
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@Kubr1ck @GerrySamuels12 @benonwine Gen X here too, though not old enough to have been around in 1976. We’re not having “endless struggle sessions” now either. Also, the way you use the term suggests you don’t know what it means or the true horror behind it.
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@GerrySamuels12 @benonwine Hi, Gen X here. We were not bombarded by social media or 24 hour news and we did "just get on with it", mainly because there was no other option. Did bad things happen? Yes. Did we have endless struggle sessions to help ease the pain? No. But you have newspaper clippings right?
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Lots of Boomers seem to be remembering the summer of 1976 with rose tinted spectacles, & think that they ‘just got in with it’
Let’s have a look at what the newspapers of the day had to say in 1976….
🧵
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