nyarlethotepscat - Tumblr blog

[nyarlethotepscat]

so you’re saying ... we should domesticate kangarooos?

there are lots of dogs that are people weight but theyre quadrupedal so they seem smaller than people. imagine if there was a dog-size domesticated bipedal animal. guy-sized creature

[nyarlethotepscat]

also yes people have written music with this

e.g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZyAm-D3nlk

the (so called) golden ratio φ has this property that it is the "most irrational" number, in the sense that its sequence of best rational approximants diminishes slowest of all real numbers (tied with the golden ratio + integers)

this is to say that like, ok, we're considering for some number α rationals p/q such that |α-p/q| is small relative to the denominator q; i.e. we're trying to find p and q co-prime minimizing |αq-p|, right

you can consider the sequence of better and better approximants |αq₀-p₀| > |αq₁ - p₁| > |αq₂ - p₂| > ... that starts with like q₀ = 1 and p₀ = floor(α), and it turns out that the α for which this sequence diminishes the slowest is φ

so, since musical notes are consonant when the ratio of their frequencies is close to a rational number, i have this strong suspicion that notes whose ratio of frequencies is φ are the most dissonant possible

so in addition to being kind of ugly when used as a ratio for a rectangle, it's also probably like the most dissonant note possible

pretty in the context of a pentagon though

[nyarlethotepscat]

Someone created a musical scale based on the golden ratio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/833_cents_scale this is an excellent practical joke IMO -- draw in all the hippy types who like the golden ratio because its pretty and surprise them with Literally The Most Dissonant Scale/Interval

the (so called) golden ratio φ has this property that it is the "most irrational" number, in the sense that its sequence of best rational approximants diminishes slowest of all real numbers (tied with the golden ratio + integers)

this is to say that like, ok, we're considering for some number α rationals p/q such that |α-p/q| is small relative to the denominator q; i.e. we're trying to find p and q co-prime minimizing |αq-p|, right

you can consider the sequence of better and better approximants |αq₀-p₀| > |αq₁ - p₁| > |αq₂ - p₂| > ... that starts with like q₀ = 1 and p₀ = floor(α), and it turns out that the α for which this sequence diminishes the slowest is φ

so, since musical notes are consonant when the ratio of their frequencies is close to a rational number, i have this strong suspicion that notes whose ratio of frequencies is φ are the most dissonant possible

so in addition to being kind of ugly when used as a ratio for a rectangle, it's also probably like the most dissonant note possible

pretty in the context of a pentagon though

[nyarlethotepscat]

... ok on a meta level it seems weird to distinguish religious moral beliefs from other kinds of moral beliefs given that religion isn’t really a natural category and e.g ‘is a fetus a person’ sort of has to bear on your views on abortion somehoe on an object level I tend to get kind of irritated with the meta level “well, these people’s behavior/voting makes perfect sense when you consider that they believe $DUMBSHIT, why don’t you have some empathy” thing. it’s good to have accurate beliefs about why other people do what they do but at the end of the day they shouldn’t believe $DUMBSHIT

They like to cherry pick

[nyarlethotepscat]

“chaser” needs to go through the same reclamation as “simp” did

“chaser” as a term of endearment

[nyarlethotepscat]

I’m starting to notice a disturbing trend among today’s adults of claims to outstanding mental health on what turn out on inspection to be pretty tenuous and caveated grounds (absence of recurring vivid waking hallucinations, production of novel speech past defined developmental age thresholds and under conditions of heightened social stimulation). This seems to be driven partly by distorted messages from the media as to what mental health entails, and partly out of a perception that these dubious claims will serve to improve or maintain their social standing (“clout”) among peers and authority figures.

As a (professionally verified) mentally well individual myself, I find the prospect of being classed with these “sane” adults alarming and dishonest. Other observers sometimes give in to the temptation to cheaply dismiss these currents as harmless experimentation in lifestyle and self-image, but this indulgent analysis overlooks the real and pressing concern that they will both degrade the social meaning of clinical terms like “healthy” or “developmentally normal” and promote overuse of finite resources intended in their current incarnations only for consumption by the demonstrably and consistently psychologically well-adjusted (employment, housing, child custody, etc). It is our job to push back against these widespread misconceptions and discourage a culture in which men and women can grow old entertaining and projecting fanciful, damaging psychiatric self-non-diagnoses as formative influences on civic institutions and the public square.

[nyarlethotepscat]

iirc there are studies that purport to show iq increases from adhd meds and my opinion is “i know the ‘performance on iq tests is just test-taking skill’ line is overdone but literally what you did here is give people a drug that improved test-taking skill in a population selected for being bad at tests, and you then proceeded to be surprised that it did that, press X to doubt”

Everyone acknowledges that “test-taking skill” is a thing, but people mainly talk about it in the context of trying to minimize that as a factor on aptitude tests. What I think we should also do is have test-taking competitions where they design tests to minimize the applicability of practical aptitude but maximize the relevance of test-taking skill, like multiple choice questions about things nobody could be expected to know, really complicated scoring mechanisms, timeframes that aren’t long enough to complete the whole test, and so on

[nyarlethotepscat]

yeah probably this is better than trying to contact friends of friends of friends although like there’s a term missing here of “how many poly people are there in the world” i guess you also have to define what an edge is which is quite nontrivial

You’ve gotta get aella on the polycule size case

The problem is most people in a polycule don't know the size! So you can't just do a poll. You'd have to like. Do some fucking investigative journalism. Like, you ask someone for the contact info for all their partners, get the contact info of each of THOSE people, and so on. But I imagine lots of ppl would not be willing to share that info. Because they hate science

[nyarlethotepscat]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93R%C3%A9nyi_model

You’ve gotta get aella on the polycule size case

The problem is most people in a polycule don't know the size! So you can't just do a poll. You'd have to like. Do some fucking investigative journalism. Like, you ask someone for the contact info for all their partners, get the contact info of each of THOSE people, and so on. But I imagine lots of ppl would not be willing to share that info. Because they hate science

[nyarlethotepscat]

to the tune of “modern major general“

Love him

[nyarlethotepscat]

they missed the best one!

sleepyposting masterpost

[nyarlethotepscat]

(i definitely do have the thing of like “i do not like being thought of as a boy” but like this is entirely distinct deciding you sucked as a person before you transition i imagine if i had a name that was less androgynous it might bother me more) im pretty “people have a lot of different experiences and woot transhumanism” about being trans enough in general ofc

So that person defending “men are trash” in one of the reblog chains is a trans woman (which i kinda expected, her username had catgirl in it)

This is a thing I notice a lot, trans women putting men down. Like TERFs do it and I get that, they’re separatists who don’t want to be “contaminated” by being in the presence of the impure.

But trans women? That just seems weird. I would have thought that if everyone assumed all my life I was an x, it would kind of force me to interact with x’es and therefore see that they vary in trashness. Even if I was also very frustrated since I’m not an x myself.

But no.

Is it the dysphoria (“I don’t want to be connected with THAT in any way”), or something else?

[nyarlethotepscat]

i tend to be very worried about trans women who do this kind of thing. “wow it sure seems like you have a very healthy relationship to your past self“

So that person defending “men are trash” in one of the reblog chains is a trans woman (which i kinda expected, her username had catgirl in it)

This is a thing I notice a lot, trans women putting men down. Like TERFs do it and I get that, they’re separatists who don’t want to be “contaminated” by being in the presence of the impure.

But trans women? That just seems weird. I would have thought that if everyone assumed all my life I was an x, it would kind of force me to interact with x’es and therefore see that they vary in trashness. Even if I was also very frustrated since I’m not an x myself.

But no.

Is it the dysphoria (“I don’t want to be connected with THAT in any way”), or something else?

[nyarlethotepscat]

I wish to comment as an outside observer “sure, the SAT is probably less bullshit and less selecting on wealth than many other metrics but this is also very much culture war bullshit that mostly exists because the us has a high school system unlike pretty much every other country”

[nyarlethotepscat]

I really am tempted to say “the printing press” here like -iirc even for arabic it’s really cost prohibitive to make a printing press economical, heaven forbid chinese -I’ve seen estimates of the number of books in Medieval Europe to be in the thousands/tens of thousands, which seems to have gone up to the millions shortly after the press was invented? - I’m not sure how much access to preexisting literature was necessary to invent things, i can believe pretty important? certainly for more abstract/basic science

I really should have a peek at the preexisting literature though

thinking about "why europe". i feel like the more i learn about history, the more it seems that while eurasia was genuinely ahead of the americas and sub saharan africa in terms of like, "development" i guess, europe doesnt really stand out among yknow, levant, india, china, the whole crew. its not *below* them ofc, rome was insanely powerful, but it doesnt stand out. and the divergence happens pretty late, i guess the earliest you could place it is... MAYBE the 15th century? but i feel like actually placing it that far back is pushing it, and its more like 16th or 17th. idk. its confusing, and weird, but seems important. altho i guess its sort of unanswerable sophistry, its not like we can rerun the experiment. but curiosity springs eternal!

[nyarlethotepscat]

see the thing that confuses me is surely calvin's snowmen are already saved or damned at the moment of their creation

[nyarlethotepscat]

I think I’m on team

- students can prove things any way they goddam please, if there’s a cheesy solution like this it’s on the person who designed the test.

in general I think banning this sort of thing discourages intuition/ an understanding of whats actually being asked and overencourages a mindless algorithmic approach.

- understanding that proving A >B does not require you to compute the values of A or B shows a genuine level of mathematical insight, learning to read the mind of whoever set the test might reflect a useful skill but has nothing to do with how math actually works. - taking things literally and being precise about what you want to be shown has a lot to do with how math actually works

- drawing a picture is not a proof; I’m not sure whether the techniques to prove it rigorously would be taught at this grade level though and I’d be inclined to be lenient

One time in grade 11 I got every answer correct on a math test and the teacher failed it because I didn’t use the method we learned in class and it’s been nearly ten years and I’m still angry. I’m going to raise my children to fuck the system