J.D. Fleming

Like, he probly won't nail my favourite scene, which is the one where Odysseus et al sail to the Island of the Dead and promptly: Do what they always do, viz., chivvy some sheep off their boat and slaughter em.

The noises about the Christopher Nolan *Odyssey* are ......................... not good.

Schlock rock: Middle-age kryptonite. Bob Seger, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac, unman.

AI summary of this week's Bagehot column in @TheEconomist ("Sir Keir Starmer Cannot Govern"): "Ow."

@MichalYouDoing @ArtemisConsort As a boy I saw "G's experiment" "re-enacted" by physicists from the top of the clock tower at the University of British Columbia. With water balloons I think. I doubt v much if anybody checked which one hit first. Pace Feynmann.

@ArtemisConsort Viviani's claim that Galileo had performed the experiment at the tower of Pisa was most likely invented as a response to Grimaldi's incredulity that Galileo had made such claims without performing such an experiment.

I’m tired of the Aristotelian physics slander. Yes, heavier object fall faster than light ones, all else equal, *when immersed in a fluid* which is every environment Aristotle had access to. Do the experiment yourself. Drop a bowling ball and a same-sized ball of foam. There’s a great paper called “Aristotle’s Physics: a Physicist’s Look” that demonstrates how Aristotelian physics is a special case approximation of Newtonian physics in the same way Newtonian physics is a special case approximation of relativity and QM. Aristotle’s physics reigned for so long not because people were unthinkingly dogmatic, but because it was genuinely hard to come up with better models. Aristotle had to model celestial objects separately from terrestrial objects because his terrestrial model is describing *terminal* velocity and breaks down in the zero-friction limit. So he had two incompatible models. Newton unified them. Now we have two incompatible models - QM and GR - and are looking for unification. The more things change…

pitilessness that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. Our society, in sum, and our very experience of the world, was damaged during that period--by treatment, not just by the disease--and we all bear the scars. But some of us, tragically, more than others.

Defiance of the countermand threatened social sanction up to and including state violence. I think it non-accidental and non-trivial that, since Covid, the medical authority has deployed this same countermand on other files, notably trans, with a boldness and

Thinking a lot about the medicalization of our entire society that occurred during Covid. What that was, civically, morally, and phenomenologically. Not exactly--not quite--a fully Orwellian override of reality, holding the latter in view precisely for the experience

Semi-deponent verbs are the Latin equivalent of breaking a recalcitrant prisoner by seemingly releasing but then immediately re-arresting him when he can just see the street

Yet again, a paper on the Shroud of Turin debunks a common Shroudie argument. No, sorry, the C14 dating samples did not come from a patched or repaired section of the fabric (as all of the samplers and experts have always said): nature.com/articles/s4049…

AI chatbots misdiagnose in over 80% of early medical cases, study finds ft.trib.al/cRifiz2

On the one hand, mind-numbing stupidity, ignorance, and scientism. (Not brain-numbing.) On the other, picture-perfect confirmation of my *Mirror of Information,* Chapter 6. Now that I consider an "acceptable trade."

ok massive curveball though

The new leader of my country's socialist party wants to usher in Utopia by taxing the rich. O MY GOD ITS SO SIMPLE WHY HAS THIS NEVER BEEN TRIED

@keithdorejel The entire Arab world, 1967: "WE ARE GOING TO FFG WAR WITH YOU." Israel: "k." A model for today.

This is one hundred percent false. Israel launched an attack on Arab neighbors in 1967 starting the Six Days War. This idiot wants to lecture kids and he doesn’t know a goddamn thing, just spouting rank propaganda.

@OMTorah is draft dodger ok

don't be an AI conscientious objector - it's pointless

Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.

Humanity to Paul Ehrlich: "You told us that population growth had to be controlled by any means necessary. That was wrong." Ehrlich (growing horns): "Well, the science changes when we know more except not in my case because I am evil." RNIP.

@libbyemmons I'll wait for the followup story in 2040, "the psycho who ruined my life"

I wish there was as much celebration of motherhood in our culture as there is condemnation of it.