Obsidian Wings

Friday, again?

by liberal japonicus

Hope I don't insult everyone by suggesting that there may be a lot of people here who are bibliophiles. So, an article.

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2021/09/why-are-ebooks-so-terrible/620068/

I've got some thoughts, but the lamp is lit.

Time for a Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

The New Thermodynamic Understanding of Clocks

Don't let the title chase you off, really interesting article.

Hi-diddly dee dee, a sailor's life for me!

by liberal japonicus

This Guardian long read is interesting.

Such obstacles made the ship an off-putting proposition for insurers. No one would agree to cover them. “They wouldn’t even tell us why we weren’t insurable, they just kept saying no,” Romundt said. “It’s kind of hard to remedy something if you don’t know what the problem is.”

Ya think?

A brief service announcement

by liberal japonicus

Some may have noted that two threads were temporarily closed. This was done in part because of some private knowledge that GftNC was going through, and will be going through for the whole month of September, a particularly difficult time. She's told me that she will almost certainly not be replying to any comments until that is over, but she has asked me to post the following:

As far as I can tell I have not said anything either to McKinney or on the trans issue that I would not have said at another time. On the other hand, being spared the necessity of prolonged response, and argumentation which includes personal defensiveness (on the trans issue that I am either a) a shill [unwittingly] for RWNJs or b) a lone, brave feminist on a blog full of woke dictators) is welcome. It goes without saying, as far as I am concerned, that neither of these theories is anywhere even vaguely adjacent to reality.

I say "in part" because there was most certainly an element of self-interest involved. I was going to bed as all this loomed on the horizon and I didn't relish a Monday morning of picking thru the wreckage of not one, but two smoldering threads. I also felt that, having had GftNC's post go into the spam folder three times, she might also feel pressure to reply. At any rate, the two threads have been reopened, and McT's response to the closing of the threads, which was posted in another thread and was placed in spam, has been restored. I won't be responding to any of them, but the commentariat is welcome to do with those what they want. I realize that the trans issue is a very contentious issue, and I'll try and post something about it in the next week or two rather than have it as a sidecar to an open thread. As for questions about Larry Summers' speech, given that it occurred in 2005, I don't think I'll be revisiting that. As this is a service announcement, this is not open for comments.

Thinking About . . . Whatever

by wj

I came across this TED talk on how language shapes how we think.
https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think/up-next
The speaker is mostly talking about how different languages shape our perception. How a language which doesn't use "right" and "left", but rather gives cardinal directions (even for which hand you are talking about), will make people much more oriented to directions than most of us are. Even though we don't have the physiological means that, for example, birds have to do that. Or a language which attaches gender to nouns, even for inanimate objects, will end up with different kinds of adjectives applied to those objects.

And it occurred to me, even within a single language, what we studied, what career we are in, what experiences we have had over the years, etc. can also influence both how we think about things and how we express our ideas. A phenomena we have seen here from time to time.

Anyway, a new Open Thread for this or other topics.

Your Texas abortion thread

by liberal japonicus

Not my best title, but whatever. Tons of things to link to out there, here are a few of them

John Roberts has lost control of the Supreme Court

The Scotus also has the relatively mild mannered Josh Marshall sounding like he wants to storm the Bastille
SCOTUS Delenda Est

Reminiscent of punking the Trump rally
TikTokers flood Texas abortion whistleblower site with Shrek memes, fake reports and porn

I like this title
Are Republicans catching the car on abortion?

but beleive this is more operant.
Don’t Be So Sure a Supreme Court Backlash Will Boost Democrats

For one thing, it turns out that abortion was not really an instant trigger for conservative evangelical political engagement. As POLITICO detailed in 2014, the evangelical community was by and large supportive of abortion rights for years after Roe v. Wade was decided. It was only when powerful figures on the right saw abortion as a way to build support for their real agenda — private segregated schools — that Jerry Falwell embraced the cause.

I think this is one reason why trying to make it out like Republicans trying to take over women's bodies doesn't really work. Because they are only doing it for political advantage. It's the equivalent of trolling, because they don't care. It's basically what Harry Frankfurt points out in his On Bullshit.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Another Guardian article about the options the Dems have nationally
Democrats rush to find strategy to counter Texas abortion law

Anyway, talk about those links or add your own.

Big Data: a Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

A week or two ago, this article was posted by CharlesWT about the word that made the play MacBeth so creepy.

Nous observed the following

Brief response to CharlesWT's Macbeth article, I think the reason why the number crunching quant side of literary analysis meets resistance is mostly because the data results can sometimes point to interesting observations, but the unpacking of that data sticks too closely to the immediate observation and does not dig deeply enough into context or method to find a reason *why* or *how* the text was shaped in that particular way.

[...]

In more general assessment work, I think the search for unambiguous measures and outcomes works against good teaching because deep learning comes from struggling to overcome ambiguities. It's often the process, not the specific knowledge acquired in the process, that matters. Information is cheap. Discernment is priceless.

I don't think nous is wrong about this at all, but this article is quite interesting in that regard.

Discuss Big data, small data or no data at all....