Perceval

The author is making a category error.

Epic poets adopting, stitching, recycling, riffing, borrowing from other sources is appropriate for the medium of and vocation of poetry. It's appropriate for an oral tradition in oral societies.

Universities are not institutions of oral societies. The scientific method is not an institution of oral societies. Reproducibility and falsification of claims would not be possible.

The idea that a research university president should be held to the standards of ancient poets rather than the standards of a research university is silly. Citation of the provenance of one's claims, ideas, facts, data, and methods is central to what makes a university and university and what makes the production of knowledge using the scientific method a success.

If Dr Gay wishes to take the works of others, remix them, put her own spin on their work, integrate them into her framework, then she should go into the arts and become a poet or lyricist.

Pratt & Whitney is a business unit of United Technologies Corporation. UTC merged with Raytheon a couple years ago. Raytheon was already a dysfunctional corporate culture, and what I hear is that the UTC management that took over is somehow even more risk averse than the old Raytheon leadership, which is hard to imagine.

Risk aversion is probably a good thing if you want an engine that will work reliably. But it's not going to produce the next big thing or massively scale output on short timelines.

Becoming a furry does constitute irreparable damage.

Controlling for attrition, do IQ scores improve after 4 years of undergraduate education?

> Clausewitz lived in a world where wars were events that were declared between states

Sort of. Born 1780, died 1831, the main wars in his life were the Napoleonic Wars.

But he would not have been unfamiliar with the Wars of Religion that convulsed Europe for 150 years following Luther's Protestant Reformation and culminated in the Peace of Westphalia. These we not regular state-on-state wars, but were a series of internationalized civil wars, caused by Protestant and Catholic low-level violence, coups, usurpations, overthrows, assassinations, and other civil conflicts. These low-level conflicts caused by non-state actors who were part of a transnational religious/ideological movement were not unlike the religious/ideological insurgencies we see today.

Clausewitz would also have seen wars of colonization/imperialism and decolonization in the New World. These were also wars of states against irregular non-state combatants. Especially after the Napoleonic Wars, when the Concert of Europe was keeping stability in Europe, the main form of warfare Clausewitz would have been observing would have been wars of colonization/decolonization.

If you spend time with officers in the U.S. military, fewer than you might expect have been assigned Clausewitz in their professional military education or read it on their own (even just the first chapter). Many just know the soundbite, "war is an extension of politics with other means."

> if there is no political goal, there will be no war

In Clausewitz, this is more of a normative statement than a rule about war in reality. One of the things he's trying to caution against is the escalatory dynamic that he views as inherent to purely military logic – that war (in a vacuum, so to speak) will always increase in intensity. But in reality, certain factors can and should ameliorate this inexorable escalation – political goals, "friction," and the "fog of war" are examples. War without the control of a political goal will be ceaselessly increasing destruction to the point of purposelessness. This is one reason why we insist on civilian control of the military, because we do not wish for an independent general staff to be prosecuting a war according solely to war's inner logic.

There was nothing for him to apologize for and his donation was not wrong.

What's our current predicament?

I just want equal opportunity to take testosterone to transition from male to alpha male.

I don't think it's an antidepressant, but it does increase testosterone, and that can improve mood: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24106072/

Fear is central to some of the most important and foundational works of political theory in Western history – Hobbes, Montesquieu, Tocqueville: https://www.amazon.com/Fear-History-Political-Corey-Robin/dp...

What are the socio-political effects of mass psychological changes brought about by putting a large chunk of the population on medications without full knowledge of the side effects?

Imagine putting an equally large percentage of the population on androgenic medications.

I wonder if the childhood obesity trend and trend of younger and younger menses are connected

rusty shut k5 down 7.5 years ago after years and years of being a deadbeat dad to the site – wasn't even willing to keep a static archive of the site up

Maybe not as rarely as you might expect: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691134604/st...

I have been using Dr. Jen's Super Paste: https://drjennatural.com/products/dr-jen-super-paste-with-na...

I landed on this one out of all the N-Ha brands because it also has flouride. Also, it doesn't have SLS, which I feel good about.

I used to need Sensodyne to manage tooth sensitivity. I would go out of my way to buy Canadian or UK Sensodyne with Novamin, since the Novamin formulations aren't sold in the U.S. However, Jen's has eliminated the tooth sensitivity without needing a numbing agent like Sensodyne, which was surprising to me.

I've stuck with Jen's even though it's more expensive. I can't speak to whether it's strengthened my enamel appreciably, but my teeth feel much better.

These are not comparable scenarios.

In the first, a massive multinational corporation is singling out an individual for punishment based on nothing more than accusation.

In the second, individual consumers are punishing a multinational corporation that explicitly expressed open contempt for them as people.

Yes, it jumps out that a lot of the county-level, patchwork pattern exhibited in the firearm-suicide data may be an artifact of the very low populations in many of those Western counties: https://medium.com/@uwdata/surprise-maps-showing-the-unexpec...

Yes, for years I would carry around an index card or a small notebook. I would jot down significant thoughts or events in bullet point format. Later, I would write out longform a blog post about the ideas and events of the week, trying to weave it together into a coherent essay. Having something light on me at all times was critical to capture ideas. Letting them marinate for a while was typically a good thing, since I could continue thinking through the angles and making horizontal connections to other things going on in my life.

There was a 20-year period of mild deflation during the Victorian Era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation

Broadly it was a time of sustained growth in both the United States and United Kingdom, despite the deflation which was driven by industrialization and productivity gains. However, certain industries did suffer as a result of the deflation, so it was neither an unvarnished good or bad economic period.

The whole drama over blue checks was like a live action remake of Dr. Seuss's The Sneetches.

The President does not have power of the purse. The House proposes a budget. The President can't spend beyond what Congress approves, and can't really decline to spend anything that Congress has approved (i.e. "impoundment").

Most of the pioneering modernist architects were socialists—not a lot of ideological overlap with individualism run amok.

While I don't think it's possible to write an article on a controversial subject that no one will take issue with, it is possible to write with a generally Neutral Point of View, which has been a guiding principle of Wikipedia since the very early days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...

Making a flat statement that the gospels are "not independent nor consistent" is not settled or universal assessment. An article written in NPOV would discuss the variety of citeable interpretations and the debate between them over time.

Despite the occasionally cringe lyrics and snare drum sound on St. Anger, the songs overall are much better and more memorable on St. Anger than on Death Magnetic, which was mostly unmemorable and sounded derivative. I'm sure hanging out with Rubin is way cooler than hanging out with Bob Rock, but just in terms of song composition the popularly maligned St. Anger is a good album.

Slayer had 4 albums before Reign in Blood: Show No Mercy (LP), Haunting the Chapel (EP), Live Undead (Live), Hell Awaits (LP).

However, the production difference between the pre-Rubin albums and the Rubin albums is stark, and the value of Rubin's help is really noticeable.

I worry that people are now so illiterate that they do not recognize that the "render unto Caesar…" quote is a historical basis for the division between church and state in the Christian world. Astonishingly, they view the Government citing the quote – the origin of separation – as a threat to separation!

Tucker made the claim that an internal USG whistleblower told him that his communications were being monitored by the NSA. Tucker stated that he sought the counsel of a Senator, and that the Senator told him that he should go public with the information. Tucker then discussed the claims on his television show. The NSA issued a statement saying that Tucker was not a surveillance target. Later, there was information that Tucker had been setting up an interview with Putin, and that those communications were intercepted, and Tucker's name was unmasked (when a U.S. citizen has communications picked up by the NSA, their name is redacted as part of the normal intelligence reporting, and it requires a high level official to request to see the actual name of the U.S. person). Subsequently, the NSA's internal watchdog began an investigation into whether Tucker was improperly targeted for surveillance. After investigating itself, the NSA cleared itself of any wrongdoing.

Sure. Raytheon Space also going through its Game of Thrones at the moment.

It seems like Hossenfelder is arguing that a lot of theoretical physics is Lakatos degenerative:

* https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/

* https://aeon.co/essays/imre-lakatos-and-the-philosophy-of-ba...

* https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Imre_Lakatos

> The difference between a progressive and a degenerative research programme lies, for Lakatos, in whether the recent changes to its auxiliary hypotheses have achieved this greater explanatory/predictive power or whether they have been made simply out of the necessity of offering some response in the face of new and troublesome evidence.

> They didn't know why or what clandestine military purpose the shuttle had, but they knew that when they found out, they'd want the same capabilities. So they just copied it, not knowing why.

This is the exact same thing that's happened with the Chinese and the X-37B:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2022/08/22/mysterious-...