panglott

Hex and Y are also pencil-and-paper games, although the paper usually needs to be some kind of pre-printed board. Mudcrack Y especially.

Sid Sackson's Games of Art collects a number of these. https://www.eaglegames.net/product-p/101319.htm

There's also Realm of Racket https://realmofracket.com/ Which maybe is shorter? I don't recall.

As far as I can tell, the fact that it remains a taboo to discuss means that it remains extremely socially salient. Some of that is the fallout of the 1960s-era denunciation campaigns, which were both seemingly effective and very painful in the context of Japanese values. Most Japanese I have talked to about this view the whole topic as extremely shameful. But with something like this, it would be useful to have some kind of positive indication that it is a historical relic, rather than just something declined to discuss anymore. But any effort to gain real demographic information is seen as a threat, because that's how buraku people were systemically blackballed in the past.

I do not believe this is entirely true. Hashimoto had to change his name to hide his background, for example. Many Japanese are extremely hesitant to speak about this issue at all; it remains a very sensitive topic. There is evidence of recent employment discrimination and marriage discrimination, especially in western Japan. Japanese silence on the issue speaks volumes. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2009/01/20/issues/bre... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin#Social_discriminatio...

I think the problem is summed up in the second sentence: "The boom is driven by the country’s agricultural and heavy industrial interests, is being carried out with little regard to the impacts on indigenous people and the environment, is proceeding with little effort to capitalize on the nation’s vast renewable energy potential, and is often fueled by corruption."

"Scuttlebutt is slang for gossip, particularly among sailors. It is also the name of a peer-to-peer system ideal for social graphs, identity and messaging. ...Secure Scuttlebutt is also different to federated social networks like Mastodon, Diaspora, GNU social, OStatus. Those technologies are not peer-to-peer, because each component is either a server or a client, but not both." https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html

It's also a system with a clear, although niche, use case that adds value in a way that FB wouldn't.

Wikipedia is not the sum of our collective knowledge. It's little more than the preface.

Just because you don't care about some old book doesn't mean that it has value to noone. One of the books found in the monastery was a thousand-year-old document written in Caucasian Albanian, for which there is no other documentation than short stone inscriptions. The Udi people speak a descendent of this language, but their language community is under severe threat. Something like this would probably be very important to a community trying to save its cultural traditions! Not to mention the historians and humanists who can often glean some amazing insights from the scanty evidence left to us by history. The last printed-out Hitler Pepe meme might be very revealing to a far-future historian trying to understand our times.

Cultural traditions are exactly those things that generation after generation of a community has seen the value of preserving.

This is in fact an article about discoveries in palimpsets, where an older manuscript was erased and used to write a new manuscript over it. Lots of similar discoveries in papyri re-used to wrap mummies, as well. It's the ancient equivalent of re-using old newsprint as trivial garbage, but a valuable discovery today.

It can be grease for the wheels of appropriation, sure. And that kind of universalization can be a further cultural attack on minority peoples—saying that not even the language shared between mother and child is the legitimate domain of the people.

But archaeological remains aren't really necessarily an artifact of the culture that lives there now. Sometimes there is a continuous cultural tradition that claims them, and sometimes not. The Mississippian mounds of the midwestern US aren't an artifact of the U.S. of A., for example—they were in danger of being looted by Americans more than anything, in the 19th century certainly.

And much as an international militia for the defense of archaeological remains is a bad idea, I think the OP was talking more about ISIS blowing up the Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra or the Taliban blowing up Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. The locals are likely descended from the people who built those structures, but we do all lose something. These religious structures were not shibboleths, but public structures into which people poured their creativity, their personality, their values, their traditions to communicate them within and beyond their community. I am not a Christian, but I am moved by the Sistine Chapel—this was Michaelangelo's goal. I am moved by the Hagia Sophia, by the Ishtar Gate.

If the Romans decide to blow up the Vatican, or the Canadians invade Missouri and carry off the artifacts of Cahokia, it's a loss to more than the residents of Rome and St. Louis. Even if (as with Palmyra &c.) it's locals who object most strongly and are the most injured.

"It was possible to get on a text-based version of the internet for free in many areas, using only a modem and a phone line. An entire section of Free $tuff From the Internet offers up a lengthy list of free-nets, grassroots phone systems that essentially allowed for free access to text-based online resources."

Makes me want to try to read a Markdown-only Internet browser, which treats native Markdown documents as the only kind of Web page.

The person first has to realize that it is an actual paper that they are supposed to be reading, instead of some kind of mangled file.

To demonstrate what a barrier LaTeX is, he illustrates by writing the title of a paper, the author, date, and first line. The result is obviously human-readable in a word processer without special training, but not in LaTeX.

The single best resource for fantasy cartographers is the Cartographer's Guild forum. https://cartographersguild.com

Mark Rosenfelder's site is an amazing rabbithole of world-building. http://www.zompist.com/howto2.htm http://www.zompist.com/virtuver.htm He's also written The Language Construction Kit and The Planet Construction Kit.

There's some great Google Plus communities around fantasy cartography, like Map-Making in Games https://plus.google.com/communities/105897774940532146183

this isn't really a weird/normal issue. People have all kinds of likes and ideas and preferences. If you live in an apartment or a tiny house or a detached suburban house with a long commute, you will be the kind of person with those preferences and be more likely to attract people with those preferences, or who are at least open to it.

I'm a transportation cyclist who went car-free while I was single in a car-centric inland US city, where "not having a car" is generally seen as being completely irresponsible, not having your shit together, and not being a serious person. I still dated people with the normal frequency, eventually got married, we now have a one-car household.

If you love your lifestyle, and think it's worth doing, and aren't a huge burden on other people, then other people can appreciate what you see in it too.

Government-issued currencies have an underlying value in that the government requires you to discharge your tax obligations in them. Everybody has to pay taxes. Since you have to have some, they make a fine currency as well. Moreover, because the government keeps printing currency, inflation encourages people to spend or invest it rather than hoard it. Bitcoin is deflationary, so it's better to hoard it rather than spend it.

Had to replace my iPod classic a while back; I just went on eBay.

Maybe he was doing one of those "try a ketogenic diets for 30 days", or stumbled upon one of those keto advocates who only eats meat and lard.

If all you read about low-carb diets is the first paragraph about any popular news story about them, then what you know is that low-carb diets are the ones where you can eat lots of meat and you should shun any foods with sugar or starches.

'"These studies represent the first rigorous scientific tests of the carb-insulin model in humans," Hall added. "The public needs to understand that this [insulin-carbohydrate] model now has pretty strong evidence against it."' https://www.vox.com/2016/7/6/12105660/do-low-carb-diets-work

My point is how this is communicated to the public. It's nice that you have spend dozens or hundreds of hours reading ketogenic diet books, and have a clear idea about the limitations, tradeoffs, and risks of this.

Ordinary members of the public get the message "only eat chicken thighs, and don't eat lettuce". That's a long way from a diet that's healthy for ordinary people.

There's a lot of people here who are really into this, but this is really the opinion of a minority of nutrionists, without a large body of scientific evidence supporting them. Low-carb diets are being sold to the public on a ridiculous premise: the quality of foods can be identified based on their major macronutrients, and "carbs" consists of a coherent group of foods. This is ridiculous because it lumps refined sugars in the same category as nutritious vegetables.

When my brother-in-law tried a low-carb diet, he would come over to dinner and say that he couldn't eat lettuce, because lettuce is a carb. Well, it is, but it has few calories, it's mostly water, and it has relatively a lot of micronutrients. Avoiding high-satiety foods rich in micronutrients and antioxidants—such as cabbages, apples, and greens—because you're categorizing them with commercial soda seems insane to me.

People have psychological models of what a meal should consist of, and for most Americans it consists of a large piece of meat as the star, some refined starches on the side, and maybe a small amount of (probably overcooked) vegetables. This is not very healthy: a healthier diet would put vegetables as the base and star of the meal. There is plenty of good evidence that:

vegetable-centered diet > refined starch-centered diet

But where does meat-centered diet fit in there? What negative health consequences are there from these diets? There are individuals who advocate for this kind of diet, but is it really something that can be recommended to the mass public? There is virtually no major culinary traditions built around this style of eating, except maybe for people who subsist upon marine mammals. My brother-in-law ended up eating grilled chicken thighs by himself until he couldn't stand it anymore.

was about to quip that Japan also has 100-year mortgages, until I saw this: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/10619518959...

If a man shows up with a gun to run me off my land, it doesn't matter whether it was my father that bought it or my grandfather or my great-grandfather. What's important is the forcible dispropriation itself.

Cases like this just make a mockery of the Lockean natural rights theory of property.

Might makes the rules, but that doesn't mean the rules are right. We can definitely shove our hands in the sand and say that they are not fair.

Why is that an important distinction? Is forcible expulsion and dispropriration more acceptable if the people were brought to the island as slaves and laborers in the mid-1700s?

Ultimately you're mostly talking about the cost of digital typography.

The claim that France/Italy/Spain had obesity rates of 5-10% was a misread of the charts, where I should have said 10-15%. But the OECD reports pretty wide discrepancies among developed nations. http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/49716427.pdf http://www.oecd.org/health/health-systems/46044572.pdf

Here's the 2017 update; France and Spain have topped 15%, but Italy dropped below 10%. http://www.oecd.org/health/health-systems/Obesity-Update-201...

You must hear from relatively a lot of generativist linguists and syntacticians. The linguists at Language Log and elsewhere regularly praise Everett's scholarship in descriptive linguistics. And there is literally no important dispute left, except non-Pirahã specialists claiming Pirahã has subordinate clauses. Getting Everett banned from working with the Pirahã is just sad and pathetic.

http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/28/poiso... http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3857

It's worth reading some of the papers where they discuss performance at counting tasks among the Pirahã. IIRC there were some people who seemed understood there was a difference in the quantity but struggled to quantify or articulate it; and there were other people who didn't struggle to articulate it at all, they just didn't bother with it or think it important.

"Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027708...