stumpyjoepete reblogged
A man staring at an axolotl in an aquarium is mysteriously transformed into an axolotl staring out from an aquarium at a man.
zhuangzification fetish
stumpyjoepete reblogged
good article on cat colony behavior. highlights under the cut
The majority of the hunted diet of free-living cats is small rodents, and it requires several small rodents a day to sustain a single cat.
This was the most surprising fact to me. That's a lot of successful kills to pull off!
stumpyjoepete reblogged
I said you could fill a book on this topic and I meant it and I'm not going to, but just to stake a claim on the take: the key reason people use the idiom of contractualism to describe invocation of and negotiation with sublime powers, demons but also fairies and genies and so on, is because vernacular law has supplanted liturgical languages as the language of magisterium, and that's what gets imbued with magical potency in folk culture.
Everyone here loves that Brian Eno quote that goes, like, "whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature"; it's that. When the language of magisterium is one that most people don't speak, the phonological features of that language are what we associate with power, and that's where you get pseudolatin incantations as a kind of huckster's business. A less-discussed effect of vernacularization of the language of authority is that it changes its topology of salience, it displaces the "essence" of power, in the mind of the public, onto the features that still stand out even to a fluent speaker.
This is where you get the Anglo-Protestant mysticization of the differences between the KJV's dialect and their own, "thou" as a word of power of a very different kind than was intended. This happens in the secular domain, also, a focus on jargon -- it is to some extent the appeal of the "buzzword" to the managerial caste -- but also on precision and formal and technical structure. Vernacularization has to some extent displaced numen from language to structure, and when we daydream about the true and essential thing of which all these experiences are pale reflections, we think now less of the language God spoke to Adam than of the rules and procedures governing that process. And in the modern era the hucksters with their pseudolatin incantations have become sovereign citizens, cod-proceduralist magi, and we must imagine Odin's songs of power as articles of law. This is why the story of the genie who grants wishes has, like the old "deal with the devil", been reimagined a cautionary tale about drafting imprecise contracts, so thoroughly that people barely remember that these stories were ever anything else.
stumpyjoepete reblogged
After extensive etymological research, I've determined that if An Lushan (of Tang-dynasty-ending rebellion fame) were born in Brazil, his name would be Lucas Arsenio.
Also, I guess another implication of this is that Roxanne is cognate to said red light.
After extensive etymological research, I've determined that if An Lushan (of Tang-dynasty-ending rebellion fame) were born in Brazil, his name would be Lucas Arsenio.
stumpyjoepete reblogged
Thurston's Orange Peel Theory
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他实在说过这样一句话
apparently doing send-ups of bs folk-histories of famous dishes is a recurring shtick:
stumpyjoepete reblogged
A mentally ill white guy who was busy tossing all his possessions into the air called me the n word as i walked by. Thanks man, I was feeling a bit out of place in Seattle, but you make it feel just like LA!
Also why the fuck is it St Patrick's Day weekend. I just want to get a beer, not lose my hearing to a bad cover of that one dropkick murphys song.
A mentally ill white guy who was busy tossing all his possessions into the air called me the n word as i walked by. Thanks man, I was feeling a bit out of place in Seattle, but you make it feel just like LA!
stumpyjoepete reblogged
uhh
UHH
Was looking at a map of Xinjiang administrative divisions and was wondering why there are so many random enclaves that don't technically belong to a prefecture or prefecture-level city.
And the answer is basically "Chinese Cossacks who for some reason still exist as a parallel administrative apparatus of the government".
I was practicing Chinese by chatting with randos on OmeTV, and no shit the first person who doesn't skip says he's from Xinjiang.
> Where in Xinjiang? > Oh, you probably don't know it. Ili prefecture. > Oh, the, uh, Kazakh autonomous something-or-other? > Oh yes, you really know your geography huh. Have you ever been to Xinjiang? > No, it's actually kind of difficult for foreigners to go there. You need like a special permit or something. > Oh, because of the political situation. > Uh. Yeah. > I've heard that it's hard for people from Xinjiang to go to the US too. > ??? Really? Why? ... Oh, I guess maybe if you're in Bingtuan (= XPCC). > Oh yes! I'm in Bingtuan! {goes on to tell me he's 3rd generation Bingtuan yada yada yada} > Oh. Wow. How about that.
I assumed blender hollandaise was a Kenji or ATK invention from 20 years ago, but I just saw it in an episode of Columbo, and apparently it's old enough that it's in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Huh.
would it have been a war crime to shoot this guy?
National "Red Cross" societies were founded after (and directly as a consequence of) the signing of the Geneva Convention. While the internationally recognized symbol is meant to be an inverted Swiss flag, the Ottomans were nonetheless not keen on using a cross as a logo, so their medics wore a "Red Crescent" instead, and this choice of symbol is recognized as equivalent under the Geneva convention.
Iran, who were rivals to the Ottomans, then insisted on using a "Red Lion and Sun", and that was also recognized as equivalent under the convention (although Iran doesn't even use it anymore). Almost immediately, there were a ton of other proposals from various countries to have their own emblems, although these were rejected. At some point, the ICRC decided to solve this once and for all with the "Red Crystal", which any country is free to use if they don't want to use the other recognized symbols. Probably a wise choice.
Anyhow, thank god the "Red Swastika" didn't take off outside of a brief period in the Republic of China.
It's one of those things, you know, like calculus
-My wife on Tampopo and 9 1/2 Weeks
stumpyjoepete reblogged
He halted below the Pythium [a shrine to Apollo], where he rested his soldiers. From this point, Mount Olympus rises to a height of more than 10 stades, a fact commemorated on an inscription by the man who measured it: The sacred height of the summit of Olympus, at Apollo’s Pythium, As measured by a plumb-line, is 10 full stades and a plethron less 4 feet. Xenagoras the son of Eumulus made this measurement. Hail, O lord! Please be generous.
According to a footnote he got it right to within about 20 meters, so I'd say he earned giving himself a plaque
"as measured by a plumb-line"? how?
Seems like it's not known for sure (this is the only extant reference to Xenagoras) but according to this article there are several possible techniques that could have been used:
something something chinese characteristics
stumpyjoepete reblogged
Excel really is an amazing example of how too much localization is worse than none at all. It makes a lot of things harder for itself through the MS Office philosophy of "do everything wrong without asking", but it goes above and beyond that doing some genuinely insane things that nobody else even attempts.
In Excel, locale determines not just UI elements, but also:
- Separators, like whether to use . or , for decimals (e.g. "1,000,000.00" becomes "1 000 000,00" in French)
- The syntax of function delimiters and format specifiers, because these were originally chosen under the assumption that the first thing followed English-region rules
- Date formats (e.g. US 10/31/2023 becomes 31/10/2023 in other locales). This (as well as differences in month and day-of-week names, etc.) influences what Excel automatically converts to a date when you don't want it to, which in turn influences what data is safe to enter manually.
- Hotkeys: These are all different by locale, mostly for no real reason. For example in English "fill right" is Ctrl+R and "fill down" is Ctrl+D, but in Spanish Ctrl+D is to fill right (for derecha) and to fill down you use Ctrl+J (for abajo, yes really). These also have the distinction of being esoterically unknowable: there is no way to list all hotkeys within the app, and the official localized documentation only contains a translation of the English-region bindings. Better see if you can find one of those 500-page "How to use Office 2013" tomes at a library sale!
- The names of most functions: e.g. BITRSHIFT becomes BIT.PRZESUNIĘCIE.W.PRAWO in Polish. (By the way, did you know that Windows treats AltGr as bidirectionally equivalent to Ctrl+Alt? Have fun with that!)
It need hardly be said that none of this is very well tested so there are 50x as many bugs in non-English locales, but the bigger problem is that none of this is at all configurable. You can't set a locale for an Excel file, or for Excel as a whole; it infers your locale from the operating system, and given how much of it simply doesn't work reliably, the standard workaround in all cases is to set your operating system locale to an English one. I've seen software that required you to change your region to the one it was made for, but Excel is the only thing I've ever seen that's internationalized so badly that it forces you to use all your other software in English. You'd think the move to a webapp version would fix this, right? But they did all they could to preserve the problem: now it infers your region from your OneDrive settings rather than your OS.
Of course, Excel tries to automatically tweak all this to match your region when you open a file, and of course it's not smart enough to always do it right, but the key thing to note is that it makes these tweaks by destructive changes to the file. They look superficially non-destructive because it will change them back if you open them in another region, but the conversion isn't reliable enough to be 100% safe, and if you were hoping to collaborate simultaneously on the same file with someone working internationally, or view it while they have a lock, go straight to hell.
I know complaining about Excel is some 1990 Dilbert kind of shit: MS Office as a whole is a kind of cautionary fable about how it's better for software to be consistent than clever. But I avoided this rabbithole for a long time and so I haven't yet got over my astonishment at how much work they put into creating problems that no other software has, only to lead to a situation where the ultimate result is "avoid using Excel on any computer set to a non-English region, if at all possible."