johnp271

I have not seen any indication that Rowling, Musk, or Adams assert that trans people are categorically a "major threat". That said, these folks do view trans people as a "major threat" to those athletes who compete in the category that once was exclusive to humans distinguished by having XX chromosomes. They believe, and rightly so in my opinion, that this athletic competition category should remain exclusive to those humans scientifically established (usually pretty obvious at birth) to have XX chromosomes.

Researchers locate neurons in the brain that respond to '0' is in same region as neurons that respond to '1', '2', etc. The empty set (nothing) is apparently encoded differently.

I always figured that liberal radio, e.g. Air America, struggled and failed because that point of view had too much competition from other media, e.g. newspapers and television. Back before internet, conservatives only had radio to hear what they considered their point of view taken seriously and the other side derided whereas liberals had lots of other options to hear their points of view taken seriously while the other side was painted as rubes.

I don't see it as ironic at all. One way anthropologists studying a society can gauge what that society values is to look at the punishments applied for various transgressions. There are severe consequences for transgressions against things that a society values highly. Thus if a society values each human life as the most precious component of their society, then it is not unreasonable if that society places the most severe penalty on anyone who ends such a life. For that "most severe penalty" to be the ending of the life of the perpetrator, if such judgement is determined with grave concern for all parties involved including the perpetrator, is not ironic. It signals to the members of that society that their very life is the most precious aspect of the society of which they are a member.

I too enjoy reading Tao, but this approach to inequalities did not work for me at all. I am a retired PhD mathematician and I've taught the full gamut of undergraduate math in college. BUT all my life I have struggled with the simplest currency conversion arithmetic when I travel overseas. When I saw Tao's first example I said to myself, if this was how I was introduced to inequalities back in school (long ago) I'd likely have been a history major.

The research and discoveries that are most deserving of a Nobel Prize are precisely the sort that are unexpected and unpredicted in advance. All this "Monday morning quarterbacking" by everyone who now suggest that this discovery should have been obvious 20+ years ago or that the talent of those who made the discovery should have been obvious is rather silly.

Arguably the story of how this researcher was treated and what she still managed to accomplish can serve as inspiration and motivation to persevere to future generations of folks with unconventional ideas or ideas that are disparaged by the 'experts'. Yes, it can also serve as motivation to research institutions to take risks and go out on limbs every now and then as there can be some wheat hidden within the chaff.

"Unfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society."

There might be unpleasant realities of living in a capitalistic society but they are less unpleasant than living in any other sort of society.

The CRTC News Release explicitly states:

"Today, the CRTC is advancing its regulatory plan to modernize Canada’s broadcasting framework and ensure online streaming services make meaningful contributions to Canadian and Indigenous content."

I would ask, who decides what is 'meaningful'? This sounds like an open door to censorship to me. Was not the requirement to make 'meaningful' contributions to society the excuse used by the Soviets and Red Chinese to stifle publications.

Adobe Photoshop has just introduced their "generative fill" tool in the new beta version. It requires an internet connection and it goes out to the web and uses AI to fill photo regions with whatever text request the user inputs. While in a way it does nothing that could not have been done before with PS, it now can do in seconds - and by someone like me with very limited PS expertise - what previously may have taken hours and required considerable PS skill. We've come a long way since the predictions of 1984 (and not just as regards Orwell).

This artist's several sentence summary of an ANN and relating it to prejudice is fascinating: "The output of an artificial neural network can be roughly defined as a conclusion obtained by generalising a limited set of observations. Surprisingly prejudice can be defined in the same way. This will always be a problem with systems that generalize information. No matter how large and representative a dataset might be there will always be an eccentric outlier that will break the system." On the one hand this succinctly sums up the challenges we face with AI systems becoming more and more ubiquitous and on the other hand the reality we non-artifical intellegent humans face in living our lives and dealing with day to day encounters.

Wow so all this was accomplished starting from scratch in January 2021. Given another year or two and a second Biden term we should be finished.

Does the McNamara Fallacy have any application to our response to COVID? I often hear pundits of all sorts, medical doctors, epidemiologists, politicians, CDC scientists, etc, make statements such as "the data shows this" and "the data says that" and then follow up with "therefore the science says we must all do such-and-such". I hold a rather narrow, rigorous - maybe closed minded - opinion of what is 'science' (so to me 'social science' is an oxymoron) thus I have a degree of skepticism when data analysis is relied on to heavily for making conclusions that are then called 'scientific'.

There is a nice 10 minute discussion about this paper by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder on her "Science without the gobbelydgook" youtube series (which I recommend). She considers the existential questions regarding necessity of complex numbers a "super-niche nerd fight". You can find the video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALc8CBYOfkw&t=78s.

The individual in the photo is 4 'months' old. Arguably 4 month old babies being nude should not be a big deal. I suspect in much of the world this is the normal attire for a 4 month old. I guess videos of babies being born (see for instance "Call the Midwife" on BBC) should now require a signed consent from the embryo first?

Because the objective of a 'headline' is to get people to continue reading, essentially it's clickbait. Which descriptive choice gets more notice and is more likely to provoke continued reading "two women" or "Two Bored...Housewives"?

Weren't the two COVID bills passed by congress, each > $1trillion, a socialization of the losses incurred by folks? Wasn't the point of the $1400 (or whatever) checks and extended unemployment benefits intended to make up for losses incurred due to COVID?

Shouldn't those who said the world would end with the killing of net neutrality be asked why the world has not ended, also why there has been no noticeable change? If you are reading this now, your action proves that all the claims of those who predicted disaster were nonsense and... dare I say, fear-mongering.

Isn't is also clear, in fact more clear, that none of the doomsday scenarios of killing net neutrality were real either?