#robustcornhusk

[nohoperadio]

35: Aisle at the grocery store you never bother walking down? and/or 41: What's the oldest thing you own? and/or 38: What's the last filter you changed?

35: Aisle at the grocery store you never bother walking down?

I think the only aisle of (at least my current) main store I've literally never made a purchase from is the beers wines and spirits aisle. I don't never drink but my interest in it fell off dramatically over the course of my twenties, now my drinking is basically limited to when I'm at gigs and even then I don't always, it's just sometimes helpful for lowering my standards if I'm seeing a band I'm not sure whether I'll enjoy. But drinking as a means to socializing doesn't appeal to me these days, and just qua beverage nothing excites me either. (Probably an influence on my indifference is that I've seen a younger sibling basically destroy his life and arguably someone else's with the help of alcohol--it hasn't made me "against" the stuff per se but it does rather take away from the lustre. Uhh sorry to bring the mood down I'll keep it light from here on out!).

(I have an unopened bottle of rum in my home distilled by the fantasy author Ben Aaronovitch which my work gave me in acknowledgement of my being just generally swell, and I have no goddamned clue what to do with it. If I was smarter at cooking perhaps I'd think of something there. Maybe you have a suggestion??)

41: What's the oldest thing you own?

I don't have anything you'd call antique, but when I'm in a second-hand bookstore (which I'm not very often nowadays because when you work in a bookshop that kind of day trip is something of a busman's holiday) I'm very easily wooed by anything that looks old as balls, and if it's not so old as balls as to be an expensive "rare book" kind of item I will sometimes persuade myself that I should buy it, regardless of how objectively low the chances of me ever reading it are. I'm not sure which of these is actually the oldest, but maybe the poster child for this genre of unwise purchase is The Complete Self-Educator:

Which is an 800-page book designed to give autodidacts a well-rounded education, it has sections on all the major sciences as well as English, French, philosophy, "English" and "World" history and other stuff, divided into lessons with little tests after each one. Pretty fun to flick through, it's got illustrations too:

For some reason old books don't always list publication years inside, but there's a written inscription in this one saying it was gifted to an Edward I. Bryars of Bristol (From John Bull) on October 26th 1939. Which isn't mind-blowingly old but I can't think of anything older I have.

38: What's the last filter you changed?

See I don't even really know what this question is, and I'm not sure whether that's because I'm not American or because I'm just generally unworldly. What are all these filters I'm supposed to be changing! I can't remember ever interacting with a "filter". I'm googling about filters and there's stuff about water filters which I don't really know what that is but I'm sure I've never changed one, there's stuff about cars which I don't own a car and never will (I guess not being American plays a role in me getting to decide that), there's stuff about air conditioning but that isn't really a thing in this country (okay you guys win that one). I don't think filters are part of my lifestyle! I hope that's not too disappointing. Maybe I'm forgetting something super obvious idk.

[autogeneity]

you don't like frozen tofu?

do people like it??

my experience has been that it goes from an excellent texture to that of an old dried out sponge after defrosting. and does not recover by soaking

[gendercensus]

@robustcornhusk:

Hello I'm Cassian (@cassolotl) and I do the Gender Census, and this is literally my partner Avery (@averixus), no joke, who does the Tradescantia Hub! :D And also congratulations you are the first person who lives in the Venn diagram overlap of finding both of our impersonal sciencesque projects immediately recognisable! I'm not sure what exactly you have won but it is probably very nerdy?

[blueaubrey]

how is your son stuffed? he looks firm, like a puffed cheeto. i adore him

He is stuffed using a lot a lot a lot a lot a LOT of polyfill! Something like 3+ bags. He's HUGE and he's HUGGABLE

[adiantum-sporophyte]

"'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department!' says Wernher von Braun." -- Wernher von Braun, Tom Lehrer

[robustcornhusk]

[friend] has scheduled some kind of emotional breakdown

very polite???

@robustcornhusk

[isaacsapphire]

@robustcornhusk linked to this in reference to voice, but it dredged up a lot of thoughts and memories. I was surprised that the author was surprised in retrospect by the anorexia theme and hadn't noticed it on their first few read-throughs. We're talking about books about the glamour and flash of LA and Vegas in the 90s; of course the heroines are heroin-chic anorexic!

The retrospective judgement of it, the present day shying away from even the willingness to admit that it's true but wrong to say, that whole desire to cover up how the (not looking like a) sausage is made.

The books themselves shy away from f/f, certainly... But again, so did the world, and they're a pretty accurate documentation of what a certain subculture was like then. Francesca Lia Block was a queer YA author once.

[sinesalvatorem]

This isn't so much social skills, so much as a skill/piece of knowledge useful for having social skills: When people on tumblr say "message me", do they mean "send an ask" or do they mean "that button, usually in the top right corner, that says 'message'; use that"? I'd think the first, but also given that the first contact is often a question, I'm not sure...

I think it varies. A lot of people still haven’t gotten around to using the messaging system. I don’t think anyone will think you’re doing something /bad/ if you use their dispreferred method.

I think it leans more toward “use the message button”? That’s definitely what I mean when I say it. I much prefer talking to people on messenger rather than via asks, because ask conversations are way harder to keep track of.

[nyarlethotepscat]

tl;dr: For 2000 years humanity’s best mathematicians stymied by their inability to conceive of the concept of *multiplying four things together*, some guy you’ve never heard of named Descartes solves the problem in half a page.

A bunch of odd conversations about mathematics after Secular Solstice-- mostly picking apart the strange and autodidactic opinions of @winged-light-blog, which I still don’t understand, (this happens when you do the right thing and don’t trust your maths teachers)-- reminded me of the little I know about the Ancient Greeks’ approach to mathematics. Their worldview was interesting enough that I’d thought I’d share them with the world, at least so we can appreciate how much about maths we moderns take for granted and don’t realise involve nontrivial insights.

 To Euclid and Archimedes and the rest of them, a number was a length, and, usually, any operations you were allowed to perform on numbers you had to be done with the old fashioned tools of a compass and straightedge, which led to problems when they tried to do things like trisect angles or square circles.

 But where this way of thinking really got them stuck was how they thought about multiplication. You could multiply a length by a length, but you’d have to satisfy yourself with the answer being the area of a rectangle -- an entirely different object. You’d prove that two areas are the same by some kind of dissection argument or something. You could multiply a length by an area, and get a volume. But if you tried to multiply a volume by something the response would be TYPE_ERROR, because geometry is about the real world and there are only 3 dimensions in the real world. And if to you tried to add a length to an area, or any funny business like that, the response would also be TYPE_ERROR, which is, I admit, a reasonable thing to do. (You could also, I think, multiply things by positive integers simply by adding them to themselves enough times, so that Euclid’s proof of the infinitude of primes still worked.) And for about 2000 years or so this is the way that western mathematicians thought, and this really screwed them over. They couldn’t talk about trying to solve equations with powers higher than the third -- (anything fancy with exponentials or power series was, of course, right out). It was much easier to think of curves as loci of fancy constructions or conic sections than anything you could remotely compute anything with. And don’t forget that this was before modern mathematical notation, so you’d have to write all your operations out laboriously in Ancient Greek. It’s a wonder they got anything done at all.

This whole complicated and annoying mess was finally resolved by Descartes. Yes, he of the fancy coordinate axes and “I think therefore I am”. On the way to basically inventing algebraic geometry and rendering almost all of ancient Greek geometry obsolete he deals with this problem in a few lines and a diagram.

First he declares by fiat that some random line segment is one (pretty much the same way that modern physicists declare that c, G, ħ and any other random constants they don’t like are 1 and that they can just rescale the units) Then he does some geometry with a pretty pair of similar triangles.

[Attempted translation: For example, letting AB be unity and wanting to multiply  BD by BC, we need only join the points A & C  and then draw DE parallel to AC. BE is then the product of the multiplication.]

And somehow you’ve multiplied a line by a line and gotten a line.

And from then on he just declares that he is allowed to do this as many times as he likes, and if he wants to take the 691st power of some line segment, so be it. And from there he was comfortable saying “This curve is the set of points satisfying x^23+ 59x^31y^3+y+47=0″ which would have made the ancient Greeks’ heads explode.

Descartes wasn’t terribly modest about his new invention of coordinate geometry, saying that “it compares to the Ancient Greek geometers like the rhetoric of Cicero compares to the ABCs of children”. And he probably should have considered the consequences of unleashing a new branch of maths onto the brains of unsuspecting university students.

(What algebraic geometry looks like today. This is scary and I don’t understand it and I don’t want to think about it) But however much of a douchebag he might have been about it, I do appreciate the ability to take 4th powers.

EDIT FOR BS: Looks like a hazy memory and some dubious sources make for an ridiculously overexaggerated story. @evolution-is-just-a-theorem Ars Magna (published a hundred years or so beforehand) seems happy to use higher powers in its treatment of the cubic and quartic. On the other hand Wikipedia mentions on the entry of La Geometrie that the ancient Greeks had a tradition of using length/areas/volumes for powers as shown. I suspect the reason why Descartes was so happy with this view of multipication is that it allowed him to express such algebraic problems geometrically, whereas previously no such interpretation could be found -- and of course with the classical view of geometry as the foundations of mathematics, this was considered to be very important.

EDIT2: “There was an additional complication: the multiplication of lines was taken to produce surfaces, the multiplication of lines by surfaces to produce volumes, and the multiplication of surfaces to be meaningless; the square of a line was literally a square, and its cube literally a cube (Fig. 5.1). This limited the Greeks’ ability to deal with polynomials of more than the third degree.Weakening of Distinction. Partly under the influence of Arabic mathematics, the distinction be-tween numbers and magnitudes was beginning to weaken.  For example,the brilliant Niccolò “Tartaglia” (The Stammerer) Fontana (c. 1500–1557)complained that some mathematicians were confusing multiplicare, the multiplication of numbers, with ducere, the multiplication of magnitudes. On the other hand, François Viète (1540–1603) argued that algebra was better then geometry, because it was not limited to equations of the third degree or lower. In fact, Descartes claimed that he began where Viète had stopped” So right that this was the Greeks’ view, right that Descartes rigorously resolved the issue at last, but there was a fair amount of groundwork needed to be laid before then -- mathematicians had to get used to the idea of higher powers of reals, even though they didn’t quite have the justification for it. from https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~mclennan/Classes/UH267/handouts/WFI/c5.pdf cheers to @robustcornhusk

[autogeneity]

re some months ago "alcohol that hits really fast", i am like two sips into this cocktail and FEELING IT

i meant to have more to say, but, as i said, FEELING IT

asdhfhjfkdlkl I hope you had/are having a great time lol

(I do love the idea that you had two sips of a cocktail and your instantly-drunken self was immediately like, "I have to go tell tumblr user autogeneity about this")

[autogeneity]

here's the sauce in question + example of what is meant by pome molasses

thank you!!

[adiantum-sporophyte]

@robustcornhusk @tinyyellowflowers-blog which one of you possessed me yesterday at the grocery store

I bought >12lb stonefruit on sight without a plan without even knowing whether I'd like some of the fruit in question

[nohoperadio]

@sungodsevenoclock tagged me for some questions like nearly a week ago and I'm just getting to them now. Which is fine I'm sure. Also @perdvivly tagged me in a branch of the same thing where they made up entirely different questions and I intend to get to those too although not this evening because those questions will be harder and I'm a little bit sleepy. Maybe tomorrow; maybe something else!

favourite colours.

This is the first question but I'm typing this answer last because I wasn't feeling it when I started this post. You know for a long time I never had a colour of my own but years of wearing the Francis Bacon shirt (rip) changed something inside me and now I possess the colour orange, I possess it now

Last song played

I've got Ones and Sixes by Low playing atm and the current track is The Innocents. I guess this is a band that makes my music taste seem cooler than a lot of things I might be playing so that worked out.

currently reading...

I'm reading Lila by Robert Pirsig due to being recommended it on this post (see I didn't forget about that post, I'm working very slowly through the list, hopefully organized thoughts on the various things will appear in some form sometime, not necessarily super soon)

currently craving...

I'm not really! If you can crave for a headache to go away then maybe I'm craving that. It's not even a bad one really though. Don't worry about me.

coffee or tea?

You know what's fucked up is that I don't really like coffee that much at all and I like tea a lot but I've drank tons of coffee in my life because I like being in cafes and it never really occurred to me to order anything except coffee when I'm in a cafe, it seemed like just the done thing. But literally all of them serve tea as well and it's only quite recently that I've realized I can just order that instead. And it's not like I didn't know that before I just arbitrarily wasn't acting on the information. My entire personality is all just stuff like this, it's awful.

---

If I try to "choose" people to tag I'll feel too guilty about omitting people so I'm going to use the semi-random method of tagging the last three mutuals to show up in my notifications, who are @jerkeline, @robustcornhusk and @toasthaste (good ones!), do this if (only if) you want to. But also I grant any mutuals reading this permission to do the questions and claim that I tagged you.

[autogeneity]

@robustcornhusk re: your tags on post:

#pretty sure this is why they invented kink and furry

yeah I think I had infinitely better luck making friends as the most unpopular kid in my primary school than I can even conceive of at the 1.5 kink events I attended. having a space chock-full of established relationships and situations requiring high trust is what I would come up with if I wanted it to be as hard as possible to make new friends. idk if furry is any better

[sinesalvatorem]

Social Competence: How do increase the density of insightful things I say in conversation? I want people to like talking to me, but I think I have a low signal-to-noise ratio. This mostly comes up at parties/social gatherings. I don't say anything because nothing I think of is interesting. Is there a way to improve SNR?

I hope you don’t mind if I don’t answer the object-level question (how to increase insight-density in a conversation) in favour of answering what I think is the meta-level question (how to be a pleasant conversationalist). [Also, all advice given here is aimed at the readership in general.]

I want to focus on the latter because signal-to-noise ratio is a terrible way to think about conversations.

This is because conversations have basically no “noise”. A lot of people with the not-geek not-autism thing hate when conversations go over things that don’t feel deep or insightful. Similarly, a lot of people who like clear systems would like to purge all the irregular verbs from their language. However, natural communication doesn’t work that way. Just as fully-regular constructed languages are hard to speak, conversations purged of “noise” are hard to have.

Firstly, because the “noise” serves an important purpose. It’s the bit of the conversation where people display the pattern of their own thoughts. When you’re aiming to be insightful, you give the other person what you think they want to hear, which tells them little about the kind of person you are. However, when you freely meander through conversation space, it lets people trace what pattern your thoughts generally follow.

Furthermore, the “noisy” parts of the conversation are generally the ones where personal information is shared. It’s where you talk about your weekend, your family, your hobbies, and all the other things that make you uniquely you. As I’ve said before, letting people see into you is what allows you to make close friends.

I think I’ll just quote HPMOR!Draco on it over and over again forever, because this is the first law of friendmaking:

Harry glanced away uncomfortably, then, with an effort, forced himself to look back at Draco. “Why are you telling me that? It seems sort of… private…”

Draco gave Harry a serious look. “One of my tutors once said that people form close friendships by knowing private things about each other, and the reason most people don’t make close friends is because they’re too embarrassed to share anything really important about themselves.” Draco turned his palms out invitingly. “Your turn?”

It doesn’t actually matter whether or not it’s embarrassment causing it. It could also be an unwillingness to seem inane. Whatever causes you to not show others who you are, that is an obstacle to becoming close to them. It’s not the signal-to-noise ratio that makes people feel connected to you, but actually feeling like they know you. 

Seeming insightful can get people to listen to you, but it won’t form a friendship on its own. It’ll be more like being a lecturer. People may seek you out to hear you speak about that particular topic, but they will only care a little about you-as-a-person. They may remember what you said on the philosophy of identity, but they won’t remember your birthday (which’ll be your fault for never telling them).

The second thing is that artificial attempts to increase the signal-to-noise ratio are generally self-defeating. If you’re trying to filter out all the uninteresting things you might say, you’ll often end up saying nothing at all. Far too many times, I’ve seen two nerds have a brief interaction, followed by both of them staring at each other trying to come up with things to say, and then drifting away from each other for the rest of the evening. Almost invariably, they wonder why the conversation died.

Conversations die when you hold yourself back from speaking. In my opinion, not wanting to seem boring is a particularly bad reason to have that hesitation. In the worst case scenario of being boring, the other person stops talking to you and drifts away. In all scenarios where you let a conversation die, the other person stops talking to you and drifts away.

However, even if you can keep the conversation by throwing out random bits of insight-porn, you will usually end up talking about the least insightful things out of the set of insightful things you could talk about. You’ll talk about the few things you manage to throw out as non-sequitur, which are generally not where the most stimulating interactions lie.

Most of the really interesting conversations I’ve had have been ones that evolved organically. The conversations you can have when both sides have a general feeling of understanding and common knowledge are usually far superior when to the ones where each person is trying to see how many layers of signalling they can be on.

So, in conclusion: Don’t hesitate to be inane. Say the things that are on your mind! Explore conversation-space! Avoid being frustrated by a conversation not being 10 lightbulbs a minute. The best conversations - and all close friendships - are built on background knowledge.

People who asked to be tagged/alerted in posts like this include: @cai10, @rhainelovespeople, @whyarealltheuseramestaken​, @curlyhumility​, @amakthel, @lilithmeetsprometheus​, @dhominis​, @overlordtulip​, @bannableoffense​, @78nanosieverts​, @onthecareandfeedingofcatgirls​, @tempestwindblown​, @robustcornhusk​, @cafemachiavelli​, @apprenticebard​, @andhishorse​, @h3lldalg0​, and several others who were untaggable for some reason.

If you also want to be tagged in future social skills post, like this post [link] to let me know. If you don’t know about this series or this blogger, you can learn more here [other link].

[sinesalvatorem]

@robustcornhusk: my favorite things are "things that are really good examples of a genre, but are also parodies of that genre"

@robustcornhusk​: so like, the ted talk about how to dry your hands after washing them

@robustcornhusk​: hot fuzz (buddy cop movie)

@robustcornhusk​: "you never even called me by my name"

@robustcornhusk​:  it turns out you can't write a parody of a country song without just writing a country song

Me: I feel that way about Dancehall sometimes

Me: That all the common elements are already so extreme that any attempt to make them seem absurd will get Poe's Law'd

Me: Like, I have listened to a 100% legit and non-parodic Dancehall song where the lyrics involved the narrator's dick being so long that, when inserted into his partner, it reached from her vagina to her armpit. There is literally nowhere to go from here.