Happy Wednesday! [DOT 28/6/23]

28/6/23 MegMegMcGee 41

Hi!

Love to hear that protecting Democracy is a “HUGE SURPRISE” from this Court.

Democracy advocates cheer unexpected Supreme Court election law wins
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/27/supreme-court-election-ruling-democracy/

Sorry I can’t keep up

Lukashenko claims he stopped Putin from ‘destroying’ Wagner group
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/27/europe/lukashenko-wagner-rebellion-negotiations-putin-intl/index.html

Florida, man.

Sprots!

Wimbledon finalist weighs in on new underwear rule as women players have split feelings
https://www.express.co.uk/sport/tennis/1784678/Wimbledon-Karolina-Pliskova-underwear-rule

Stonks!

S&P 500 futures inch lower after Tuesday’s tech-fueled rally: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/27/stock-market-today-live-updates.html

That’s too bad. I’ve always loved A Room With A View.

Julian Sands confirmed dead after human remains identified
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jun/27/human-remains-found-in-california-mountains-confirmed-as-julian-sands

What? Ew.

Ryan Seacrest to replace ‘Wheel of Fortune’ host Pat Sajak
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/06/27/ryan-seacrest-wheel-of-fortune/

Today in cute:

Have a super awesome day!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

41 Comments

  1. The jump-roping puppies are almost too cute to endure.

    When we got Faithful Hound he was a very sleek and active shelter puppy who treated this apartment like a particularly challenging obstacle course. It was incredible. He would leap from the low-slung mid-century-modern sofa to one of the club chairs and then race around and throw himself on the bed, toss the pillows to the floor, and then race out again. Two or three times I saw him go from a standing position to my kitchen island, which is a little over three feet high. I have no idea how he did this. He also figured out how to let himself out of the apartment, but that only lasted for a couple of weeks, and he never actually left the floor. He would settle in and nap outside our apartment door, because he couldn’t let himself in again. This was back when I actually knew my neighbors, so if one of them happened to be around they’d call the super, who’d open my apartment door and give him a little treat.

    This is all prefatory to my observation that I always wanted to enroll Faithful Hound in agility training classes. He could have been a canine version of Simone Biles, I’m positive of it. But there’s nothing like that up here, and the downtown places I contacted demanded that the Faithful Hound and both of us humans be there, because we were to be trained ourselves, and the classes were held on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1 to 3 pm. That’s fine if you’re Georgina Bloomberg training a dressage horse, but a little inconvenient for two office drones.

    Crazy. Manhattan is crazy. 0 stars, do not recommend.

  2. …ok…so…this one has me scratching my head

    …not the answer…I’m pretty sure I know what that is…& not why it’s designed to trick people & start a debate

    …but the part where the argument people are having about it seems to be that some people think it reads 6/(2(1+2))…which is how I understood it to read…& some insist it’s (6/2) x (1+2)…but they don’t seem to explain it that way…they insist that you solve the bracketed expression first but then left to right (“as written”) because the multiplication & division have “equal weight”…except if you have to perform one before the other that doesn’t seem very “equal” to me…borderline arbitrary, even…so aside from the part where the notation could have easily cleared that up instead of trying to make people argue about the answer…I’m curious…does anyone actually think the way it’s been written does come out with a 9 not a 1?

    …to me the space either side of the ÷ & the lack of one between the 2 & the brackets makes it a slam dunk that it reads the way I think…but…well…there’s some true believers in the replies who will not be dissuaded

    • It’s been a while (since it’s been a while, and it’s been a while since then ((can’t help myself, my friend did it to the stain song and it happens in my head every single time, so…))

      But I thought I was taught it was multiplication between the number and the (, no?

      • …it’s been a long time…but I feel like if it was supposed to have the 6÷2 resolved before multiplying by the bracket that would have needed that to be within its own brackets…with a x between the two?

        …oddly enough shortly before coming across it I was reading something about the fanta-faced fatuous fantasist claiming back when he squatted in the oval office that he had “an absolute right” to do something & wondering how many people who would side with him would comprehend an explanation of the difference between saying “I absolutely have a right” as an assertion (however poorly-founded) that they mean “I absolutely [should] have a right” & denying it means something should change to recognize it…& the strict meaning of an “absolute right“…which would be so laughably inapplicable to the power he was suggesting was vested in him as to be delusional

        …& idly thinking that it was harder to have that kind of substitution error in parsing mathematical expressions than verbal ones

        …I dunno…maybe I need to dust off my roland barthes & have a bit of a think about the meaning of meaning

        …or remember what it is I’m supposed to be thinking about & try to do something vaguely constructive with my wednesday…like teach puppies to skip rope?

    • The rule is called the order of operations and there’s an acronym that tells you what order to use when doing the calculation:

      PEMDAS is an acronym used to mention the order of operations to be followed while solving expressions having multiple operations. PEMDAS stands for P- Parentheses, E- Exponents, M- Multiplication, D- Division, A- Addition, and S- Subtraction.

      PEMDAS was first popularized in 1917. I would have thought that anyone who attended elementary school in the last century would be familiar with it. I weep for the world.

      • …according to the link @awhit kindly supplied…the answer according to the person who set the question is in fact 9

        …though, while I follow the reasoning I still think that as formatted in the “trick question” formulation pictured in the tweet the typesetting is wrong for the intended expression & the fault lies not with 1 being an answer derived from an outdated approach to notation but by misstating the expression itself

        …it seems as though it turns on modern practice to be that the notation follows the way a calculator is programmed to interpret it…which is 6÷2×3…no spaces…& I don’t argue that shouldn’t be 9

        …but I think the question they posed (intentionally or otherwise) was a different one…as at least one person in the comments on their explanation pointed out…if you put 6/(2*(1+2)) into a calculator it still returns a 1

        …basically I think if the “correct” answer is 9 then the spacing is…disingenuous?

        • Trick question is right. Order of operations absolutists are a lot like hard core grammar nazis — they like constructing things in stupid, obscure ways that are irrelevant to actual operating reality, and then use them to mock people instead of enlighten them.

          Serious mathematicians — the ones who work at the truly high levels — scoff at this stuff the same way that serious writers ignore the rules absolutists. If something is so hard to figure out for purely formal reasons, it’s the fault of the creator, not the reader.

          • …I do think it’s inarguable that plenty of bad faith arguments can be pointed to which try to “artfully” cherry pick axioms, precepts, definitions of terms & framing devices to argue 2+2=5…& that those people are routinely more fond of mocking than understanding…so I’m not saying this because I disagree with that

            …but…I guess one way or another I spend a fair bit of time…& have done for as long as I can remember…trying to puzzle out the “how do you get there?” of things that don’t make sense to me…& I think the vast majority of the time that isn’t because of any malice on the part of the speaker that’s confused me…certainly I can with some frequency take a statement that’s essentially gibberish as stated verbatim & come out with a perfectly legitimate statement that got garbled…because we think faster than we speak & when you’re in a hurry & trying to “catch up with yourself” you can blow past showing your working…it’s probably why I’m a fan of the written word…because in a traditional pre-internet sense that came with an implicit promise of being considered speech

            …so…I tend to think there’s very possibly more grey than back & white to be found with casual speech…but that there’s been an unhelpful blurring of the line between thoughtless & thoughtful expression as one of the many feedback loops of common usage & the internet…text speak being arguably a forerunner, I suppose

            …so when it comes to serious writers ignoring the rules…at least the way they taught things when I studied those…it absolutely mattered that they were understood to know the rules well enough that deviating from them was a conscious choice made for reasons that could be derived from how & where & for what purpose they did so…& how little that had in common with blundering into doing something superficially similar due to ignorance of the rules

            …though even that has a grey area…a while back @brightersideoflife levelled some criticism at the composition of standardised tests…which in the whole I think have a fairly solid foundation…there’s been a lot of work done around what in the UK was dubbed BEV for black English vernacular & generally maps onto what the US calls AAVE…since the 70s it’s been demonstrated that kids who can score poorly in verbal reasoning tests are in fact possessed of an array of verbal skills that leave a good proportion of better scoring students in the dust in the context of informal conversation

            …by making use of code-switching, referential shorthand of various kinds & a host of other “tricks” their casual chat resembles several parallel conversations of the linear & comparatively staid dialogue of some of their peers taking place simultaneously

            …personally I think that judging either group according the grading curve their not-exactly-peers would produce isn’t going to be a good way to gauge what you’re ostensibly testing for…let alone give you a good read on any kind of hierarchy of “intelligence”…but I’d also be sympathetic to the argument that in the context of those kinds of vernaculars not directly being aware of the original reasons for “ignoring” the rules when you are following the rules of how discourse operates within your community isn’t the same as being ignorant of what makes doing it one way or the other “correct” since it gets a different answer depending on the context in which you intend the meaning of correct

            …the object of the exercise…to my mind, at any rate, is to communicate an intended meaning…so if you succeed at that it’s correct for at least one value of the term…& I’d agree that the onus is generally accepted to be on the part of the speaker to be adequately clear about what that is…but…I always thought barthes had a lot of good points about how that part shakes out in practice once the reader is the active element & the author is (largely) a passive voice…if you can show the text supports a reading the author didn’t intend it’s got a degree of its own validity that the author’s intent doesn’t necessarily invalidate…it’s kind of an “evaluate on a case by case basis” sort of a thing

            …most of the time the stakes aren’t in “absolute rights” territory so it’s borderline a recreational pursuit on my part…but some smart people back around the turn of the last century got plenty serious about it if anyone happens to be interested

            https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/s6.html

            …the example of “the present king of france is bald” gets slung about a lot, I’ve noticed…mostly not by people familiar with russell’s paradox…let alone the substance on which he & frege differed

            russell & frege (cambridge university press)

            …all of which is light years away from the bad-faith sophistry used as a bludgeon that you were talking about…but for all that I believe was on all sides an earnest pursuit of enlightenment by serious thinkers that illustrated a lot of ways in which we understand things that are at some levels paradoxical…russell was substantively right about many of the erroneous conclusions that seemed to follow from elements of frege’s thesis…but that didn’t invalidate the abundant insights into how language operates that he laid out in sense & reference

            …that said…there’s also a reason why the most serious mathematician I know refuses point blank to be the one who has to figure out how to split the bill

            …horses for courses & all that?

            • Based on how I learned math I would say the answer is 1. But also I had math teachers who were huge about adding brackets and parentheses to clearly specify how the expression should be read.

              I understand why the answer is 9. It’s just not intuitive based on how I learned it without clarification in that question.

            • There’s a huge value in teaching formal structures like order of operations and grammar, but not as ends in themselves. They have to lead into the issues of code switching in relevant forms to be useful in any larger way.

              Just like any mathematician will tell you there are many valid ways to display arithmetic, linguists will tell you there isn’t a single set of rules for grammar, or more broadly speaking usage.

              You’re not going to be able to get ten year olds to dig into the full  complexity of the history and geography of English. But you can play around a bit with things like double negatives, and the ways formal English allows them, and when they should be avoided.

              Likewise, kids that age can start thinking about negative numbers in different ways.

              The point of all of this is to get kids to see these things as conversations rather than edicts, and the extent to which the ground rules can be negotiated.

               

              • …I doubt even the guy who set the question & said the answer was 9 thinks that “formal structures like order of operations and grammar” are “ends in themselves”…they’re elements of a broader framework that enable a degree of precision that would otherwise be hard to reliably reproduce

                …whereas the code-switching is less a thing that needs to be lead into than it is a pre-existing parallel structure born of familiarity with different contexts in which the vocabulary & rules of usage are divergent…it’s a thing many people do well before they could consciously articulate what it is they’re doing when they do so

                …& whilst there may be a number of different schools (or even languages) when it comes to mathematical notation they do all have to adhere to the prerequisite that they are internally coherent within the broader framework in a way that doesn’t map all that well onto a linguistics model

                …similarly not clear where the 10yr olds come into it but obviously I wouldn’t be expecting them to read up on frege or the logical calculus russell converted statements to in order to calculate a truth value…but that wouldn’t exclude several kids I’ve known at that age from being more than able to grasp (& indeed speak intelligently about) the concepts involved if approached through an idiom they already have an understanding & familiarity with…& the same would hold true for mathematics

                …so depending on what “all this” is supposed to cover I wouldn’t have said even with kids that it boiled down to “conversations not edicts” given that mathematics isn’t really a thing where you can talk your way around to the answer being other than the right one…but I’d certainly buy that in language things are less rigid & rules better thought of as guidelines…just not really that you can negotiate with the internal laws that govern mathematics

                …either way I do recommend looking into that paradox of russell’s even if you don’t have any interest in the rest of what I was banging on about before my day turned into an unholy mess of trying to unfuck the aftermath of an elderly lady having her phone stolen & her finances compromised…it’s a doozy

  4. I can’t watch “Wheel of Fortune.” It makes me crazy. The idiot contestants all play the game like they’ve never heard of it before stepping into the studio, and Sajak — a right-wing troll in real life — acts like a bored and frustrated high school senior on the last day of school (despite working, like, 30 days a year for millions of dollars) and rather aggressively treats the contestants like they’re morons.

    … I revise my previous choice of what piece of art best describes America.

    • …I used to have a similar problem with paxman on university challenge…which a number of members of my family were partial to

      …he’s a smart guy…& his career involved a fair bit of forcefully interrogating politicians & other people who he developed a reputation for putting on the spot

      …but being scornfully dismissive of the students when they answered incorrectly in a way that heavily implied he would never have made such a crassly ignorant mistake…while sitting in front of the answers someone had supplied him with in advance…was somewhere between preening & arrogance…& a discordant note for a show about competing to demonstrate the ability to recall knowledge independently?

      • That’s lousy, especially toward younger adults. Alex Trebek sometimes got a little too precious about his corrections too, so it’s not like it doesn’t happen. But Sajak isn’t just celebrating their failures. He definite comes across as mocking them even when they’re talking about themselves. He really acts like he can’t believe he has to share a room with these idiots, and it’s kind of grotesque.

        • I used to love Alex Trebek when the answer (in the form of a question) was a foreign term. He grew up in a bilingual French/English household, so fine, but if the answer were something like “Gemütlichkeit” or “Sprezzatura” he’d put this almost operatic spin on the pronunciation. I remember watching and thinking “You don’t really pronounce it like that, Alex. If you did it would take you 15 minutes to get through the shortest and most mundane conversation.”

    • Sajak is unwatchable. He basically seethes with contempt and anger, and barely manages to conceal it. I think he wanted a much broader career, and despite his millions, he blames the world for not watching his talk show decades ago and forcing him to do Wheel forever. I have to wonder if this is solely his decision, or did someone higher up finally say, “Listen, this guy is getting steadily more unpleasant, and we need to deal with it.”

      This is a completely separate issue from how idiotic the show itself is.

    • I’m impressed that the producers of the show skipped the idiocy of Jeopardy as far as finding a new host, though.

      Bumping up interest by trying out different guest hosts was clever, but producer Mike Richards picking himself was the kind of thing Chris Licht would have come up with if he was producing game shows instead of the news.

  6. So, I had 1, which makes me old and outdated.

    Separately, it amused me how much hub-ub there was over a new Jeopardy host, and yet, the game show on right after just picked a smiling face. Where’s the uproar?

    Also, does anyone under 70 still watch Wheel?

    • Not really. I occasionally watch Jeopardy (usually during events), and Wheel of course comes on immediately after. While I’m hunting for the remote, I get exposed to Sajak’s condescension. I don’t think I’ve sat through a full episode in years.

      Wheel appeals to people who can’t answer any Jeopardy questions.

  7. Mel Brooks turns 97 today.

    This is an article about his involvement in the recent History of the World Part II:

    https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2023-06-22/history-of-the-world-part-ii-mel-brooks-nick-kroll-ike-barinholtz

    Once he signed off on the structure, Brooks started pitching jokes he had been sitting on for “literally decades.” For instance, Barinholtz knew he wanted to do a segment in which he’d play Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. He recalls, “We kind of said [to Brooks], ‘Yeah, well we have this Grant Civil War piece.’ And he goes, ‘Perfect. When Lee signs the treaty, he’ll turn over and his saber will hit all of his men in the nuts.’ And it’s just like, boom, there you go. That is in the show. He’s 96, but he’s still spry. You could pitch him something and he can think about it for a second and give you a really smart insight on that pitch.”

    This is a fun interview of Brooks by Judd Apatow

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/07/mel-brooks-judd-apatow-interview/674167/

    Brooks describing his job defusing explosives during WW2:

    You’d go to the toilet, and there was a chain that hung down, and if you pulled the chain, you’d blow up the house. You’d go right to heaven. So the first place we’d look was in that water closet, right above the toilet. And then every door could have a hinge attached to a bomb. When the troops cleared out a farmhouse, we’d go right in and clean it up so that they could actually sleep in it, stay in it for a night or two, instead of on the ground. The scariest and funniest one was a jar of pickles. Our top sergeant explained to us: “Don’t open a jar.” Because in the middle of the pickles, there could be dynamite. He had defused it already. So he took out the jar, he took off the lid, and in the middle of the pickles there was a stick of dynamite.

  9. The Wimbledon rule change is great, but there’s so much internalized stress these players have around periods and underwear that some expressed concern that people would “know” they’re on their periods if they wore dark underwear.

    Like the easy answer is wear dark underwear regularly at practice and events so that it’s not an unusual thing. Or so many women wear dark underwear that statistically you know it’s unlikely they’re all on their periods.

    But then I think about how people treat athletes and if they wore dark underwear every practice for 2 weeks before the event, you know some assholes would still be like “hurr durr durr she’s on the rag!”

    • Once upon a time I used to watch a lot of tennis (it was right after my divorce and I needed something to zone out to), and I don’t remember a single incident when I either noticed it, or someone else noticed it, or there was even a comment made about it during/after the match on TV.  I get that the women players were stressed about this, but I wonder if this is more of a Streisand Effect problem than anything else.

Leave a Reply