IDK What is Going On… [DOT 10/5/22]

...Tell Us What is Going On

10/5/22 myopicprophet 63

I have just gone through Covid, again, as I mentioned before so I have no clue as to WTF is going on. I found some time to get some shit done but, unfortunately, the site might be slow for a few days until I can finish…please bear with us.

If this turns out to be another two DOT day please pay attention to the other one. If this ends up being the only DOT of the day, please share stuff as you normally would.


[…full disclosure…I was expecting to be on DOT detail today…& last time this happened I…”expanded” on myo’s post…but I’m pretty sure if I resist that temptation it might make @butcherbakertoiletrymaker ‘s day…so…here we are?]

I’ll be mostly out of commission until at least next week (after my hopefully Covid-free birthday/Mother’s Day weekend) so hit me up if you have any issues worse than extreme lag, specifically with posts that include video-embeds.

Thanks for your patience.

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About myopicprophet 134 Articles
Kinja refugee. Rants often. Right sometimes.

63 Comments

    • Thanks. I am mostly over this bout but am too tired and exhausted to stay awake for longer than a few hours at a time. I am one of the unlucky ones who suffer from “long covid”.

      • Oh…and due to my poor Englishing I failed to mention that I’ll be mostly out of commission until next week because I am back to chaotic 18 hour days and then a Mother’s Day/birthday weekend…not because I am sick with covid like the past two weeks.

        Mind you, I am off today because I am too tired so perhaps I’ll get the shit I need done…at least on here.

    • …figured you’d think so…muttermuttergrumblemutter…eye of the beholder…muttergrumblemutter

      …I’ll try not to spoil the effect by flooding the comments with the links I didn’t add to it…but for the record that’s harder than it looks?

        • …whether or not the tree that falls in the forest when you’re not looking makes a sound may be beside the point

          …but I don’t know as how ignoring falling trees until there isn’t a forest at all is quite where that koan is intended to take a grasshopper

          …but then I guess I don’t follow what makes you object to including more above the line to begin with so I suppose I could be wrong about that…it does seem a little at odds with a place that started out trying to provide a spot where those so inclined might opt to discuss that sort of thing, though?

          • Pfft. You do you. That’s pretty much the point of DeadSplinter.

            On a related but tangential issue, I’ve realized it’s not the length (I mean, I read an actual print newspaper every day) that bothers me, it’s the italics. I’ve found it’s headache-inducing to read more than a few sentences in italics. I personally have stopped using the quote function in favor of just labeling things “quote.” But I appreciate you reproducing the content for people who may not have access, or time to click links. I’m not sure if myo can adjust that so that we just have the red banner to the left and the words are in regular font. And maybe it’s just me that finds it uncomfortable.

            • …not sure how easy it is to alter the way the blockquote stuff is formatted (I think it’s a wordpress thing & I’m not certain how much leeway it has) so thus far I haven’t seen a way to un-italic it by default & have held off trying to mess about with editing the html in an effort to tweak it…for I fear that way madness lies

              …but I’d be inclined to agree that the forced italics in the quotes are something it would be nice to be able to not have…the flipside being that being able to “caption” them with a citation/link is convenient…which is why I’ve kept doing them that way

              …it’s a good point, either way…I’ll have a think & see if I can come up with a better compromise

            • There is not a way to remove italics from blockquotes (at least without doing a whole lot of work on a child theme), unfortunately. Hopefully that doesn’t bother others?

              I bug @splinterrip about the lengths of his DOTs all the time but only because, as I have taken the time to express to him behind the scenes, I feel that he might enjoy shortening them in order to write more posts about other things.

              No one should be put down for anything they offer ATL. People can express themselves in any way they choose…as you mentioned…it’s the entire point of DS.

              • I think the solution for all of it is to just insert the links and not mess with all of the block quotes.  That way, Jake can link to his heart’s content, those who find reading pages and pages of italics difficult will be able to read the articles in regular text on their home pages, and I will finally, blessedly, shut the fuck up.

                • …for what it’s worth I took to the block-quote thing over time because it seemed that (either through a lack of time or a paywall-related lack of access) including that stuff meant more people saw it than would otherwise…& hopefully might then feel like discussing some part of it in the comments

                  …it’s an imperfect system but the earlier DOTs I produced were pretty much a string of a larger number of links…including a bunch of NYT ones that wordpress would auto-embed as images I think most folks didn’t even realize could be clicked on as links…so I’m not sure that necessarily qualifies as an improvement from all points of view

                  …if the italics are the problem…which it does sort of sound like they might be…I’ll see what formatting options I have that might avoid those, though?

                  • That’s right, I remember now.

                    I was just poking around in the text editor and there is a block option for Preformatted Text which does keep a non-italicized format, but does also use a different font which might, maybe, work as an alternative.

                    Or, you can use the Classic text block which uses the same editing toolbar as we have for comments, which would enable you to indent the blocks as a more visually obvious block quote without the italics.

                    • …right you are…I’ll try to find some time to mess around with the options this side of thursday (or 2nd wednesday) morning & see what I can get working

                    • …that’s an extremely complimentary way of describing that function…so thanks for that…& I expect I’ll stick to a fair bit of excerpt/quote : me-banging-on in terms of ratio…but if I can avoid the overabundance of italics I think I’d probably count myself among those who’d consider that a bonus so I’ll give that part a go & see where it gets me next time?

  5. …who added the editor’s note…&…or, at least, that…failed to add whose note it was?

    …&…more importantly…why did said person refrain from AT LEAST fixing my punctuation?

  8. Was listening to Make Me Smart this morning and they were talking about an interview that, I think, Chris Murphy did with some other news organization.  He said that if and when the Republicans retake Congress and the White House, they will absolutely eliminate the filibuster so they can then pass a nationwide ban on abortion.  This is absolutely true.  Will it have any impact on S&M?  No, it will not.  M is an actual Republican who is totally on board with making abortion illegal.  S is simply an idiot who thinks pandering to Republicans at home will get them to vote for her.  I wouldn’t be surprised if she voted in favor of the ban and then lost the next election anyway.

    • They’ll finesse it in a way which gives the press a fig leaf to pretend like anyone who complains is engaging in partisan division.

      The press of course, will be prepped to say this by right wing PR, but won’t say anything about how they all magically came to this point of view.

      Just like they finessed stacking the Supreme Court. As far as the press is concerned, the GOP sets the terms for debate and their role is just to judge how appropriately everyone follows the rules.

    • I’d argue that S doesn’t give a fuck about anyone who might vote for her when her senate seat is open because I think she cares more about positioning herself as a lobbyist?

    • I’ve seen this link a few times, which made me wonder, why not keep that cute little bugger?

      Uh, bad idea:

      https://petkeen.com/do-coyotes-make-good-pets/

      Quote: Dogs have evolved to adapt well to living with humans. Their diet has changed. Humans have selectively bred canines for many traits, including hunting, herding, and companionship. So, we’re talking hundreds of years together. That’s not the case with coyotes, which are essentially wild animals.

      Domestication isn’t simply a matter of raising a coyote as a puppy. Instinct will kick in when a coyote sees a rabbit—or the family cat—run away. It’ll likely present problems with any other dogs in the household or neighborhood. Coyotes are still coyotes and will probably act aggressively toward any other canine it encounters. Remember that these instincts still exist with domesticated dogs, too.

      We’re not even scratching the surface about other things, such as housebreaking, neutering, and training. Coyotes are intelligent animals, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to teach one to sit and stay, even with some treats as motivators.

      • There was a longterm experiment in Russia to see if foxes could be bred to be tame. They selected over generations for lack of aggression, fear, etc. and it worked after many years.

        One thing that was interesting is that selecting for those traits also resulted in physical changes to the foxes, like different tails, ears and jaws. This confirmed how much genes can control multiple traits at once, and how complicated evolution can get as a result.

        It also highlights one of the bad biases (they have a lot) among a lot of evolutionary psychologists. Most of the junk that gets published in popular press assumes that psychological traits evolve in a simple manner, but they are really weak at untangling possible correlations with unrelated traits. Some will acknowledge the issue, but of that subset almost none have a clue how to even begin to sort this out.

        • …I can’t currently lay a hand on the link but I read something fairly recently that had to do with how small the sample sizes have been for most of the stuff that’s been the accepted mainstream view of how a lot of neurological mechanics work and what sort of stuff that shows up in brain scans indicates things we think of a specific conditions…like psychopathy for example

          …it was pretty interesting & I’m not sure that does it justice as a precis so I’ll come back if I do figure out where I made a note of that link?

          • …so…I’m not altogether sure where I came across it but it seems like whatever it was I read was produced off the back of this (which was a paper recently-ish published in nature)

            …but it looks like some weeks back there was something in the NYT that mentioned it…& which covers at least some of the ways in which studies that “show” something is connected to what the study shows to be a trait in common between different brains might not be as well founded as they’re often taken to be

            “The problem, the Nature authors argued, is that neuroscientists often are searching for those associations in groups of study subjects that are too small, leading to results that are statistically “underpowered.” In general, they calculated, thousands of subjects should be included for a brain-wide association study to produce a finding that other studies can replicate. […]
            Specific instances of underpowered studies are legion. So much so, says Terry Jernigan, director of the Center for Human Development at the University of California, San Diego, that singling out an example “would simply be unfair.” Indeed, according to a paper from 2020 in NeuroImage, the average number of study subjects in more than a thousand of the most cited brain-imaging papers, published between 1990 and 2012, was 12; the Nature paper calculated that the median sample size for neuroimaging studies uploaded to a popular open-access platform as of September 2021 was 23.

            Unfortunately, small M.R.I. samples frequently return strong associations as a matter of chance. For example, let’s say you want to see if there is a correlation between eye color and a preference for strawberries. If you look at enough groups of 25 random people, eventually you will happen upon a group in which blue-eyed people like strawberries much more than brown-eyed people do. But if five independent research groups run this study and only one of them finds this relationship between eye color and a love of berries, that will be the group most likely to publish its results — despite returning the least representative results. That’s because journals historically have preferred surprising correlations to findings of no correlation, a phenomenon known as publication bias. “The paradoxical effect is that the answer that’s the most wrong gets published if you use a small sample,” says Nico Dosenbach, an associate professor of neurology at Washington University and an author of the Nature study.
            […]
            The fact that so many associational studies are underpowered — and often untested in other groups of subjects before publication — has led to reports of myriad links between brain features and psychiatric disorders that are probably unreliable.”

            …though it’s not all apples to oranges

            “the conclusion of the Nature paper applies only to studies that compare M.R.I.s from multiple people in order to identify differences among them relating to complex mental traits. Neuroimaging studies that show brain changes taking place within individuals, on the other hand, can be dependable even with very few participants. For instance, the first notable paper to demonstrate that most people’s brains work in roughly the same way appeared in Science in 2001 and included only six participants, says Russell A. Poldrack, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. That study’s researchers recorded each subject’s brain activity while viewing pictures of cats, faces, man-made objects and nonsense images. It didn’t matter that each brain was unique — the changes that took place in that brain could be assigned to seeing different types of pictures.”

            …either way…I think I err towards a belief that brains are a bit like “the markets”…no one really knows how they work…& anyone who claims to be certain they’re right about what they’ll do & why is entirely more likely to be wrong in some important way?

            • Agreed, that sample sizes are typically much too small–and frankly, often much to male, & too white, too.

              It started getting talked about in Autism, within the last 5-or-so years, because of the ways ASD presents differently in Women & Girls:

              https://www.spectrumnews.org/opinion/seeking-precise-portraits-of-girls-with-autism/

               

              And this one was more recent–about the uselessly small sample sizes in too many research studies:

              https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/studies-size-matters-let-us-count-ways/

               

              • …aside from the part where it’s lamentable…particularly where you’d have thought the effects would have been easier to avoid if not necessarily predict…like dosages for medication where any vet could tell you physiological differences need to be accounted for…it’s sort of fascinating?

                …the autism stuff for example…I get that it’s hard to say “these two things that don’t look alike are the same thing…but you’ll have to take my word for it because it’s a thing that we don’t understand so I can’t point you to the part of the relevant brains that match”…but there are a lot of conditions where diagnosis is complicated because some people (deliberately or otherwise) are better at masking them…so you would have thought that to some extent it shouldn’t have taken so long to get the idea that something like autism would present differently in a group where effectively a great deal of the external elements of a patient’s experience create an entirely different behavioral context?

                • @SplinterRip, this part of your ponderings, “…I get that it’s hard to say ‘these two things that don’t look alike are the same thing’…”

                   

                  are part of why I’m SO incredibly grateful that my first job working with kids who have ASD’s was where it was–basically as much of an “Autism on the industrial scale”–place as you can get, while still providing excellent, high-quality care.

                  It really *wasn’t* that big…

                  but we had 8 rooms, with up to 7 children per room, and children were assigned to the classrooms by their skill levels–so the kids who needed the most support (in the mental health field & educational settings, the children considered “low functioning”) were in one room.

                  Then kids who had *slightly* more skills were grouped together–all the way on up, until you had the “high functioning**” kids together in *their* room…

                  We had as many as 56 kids in our program every morning, with another 56 each afternoon…

                  And some kids were MWF, some Tues/Thurs, and others were Monday through Friday when I started… and that didn’t include the kids in our ABA program (another 32-or-so each day!)…

                  So I was lucky enough to see the whole spectrum. Kids with “severe & profound” ASD, kids who had multiple comorbidities, ones who had no spoken words but who could read at age 3, others who “seemed normal” (🙄) but who did definitely have an ASD diagnosis…

                  And ^^that^^ “industrial scale exposure” really does help me do my job better now, because I’ve seen sooooo many parts of The Spectrum (in addition to most likely being on it myself!).

                  There is 100% truth, to the old adage of “When you’ve met one person with Autism, you’ve met one person with Autism.”

                  But the thing the adage doesn’t get into, is that there are *also* Rhymes, Echoes, and sometimes even repeating patterns to be found there😉😁💖

                  And you only see ^^^those things^^^ when you have the privilege of experiencing the “mass scale” side of ASD’s, because if you just experience Autism on a “single student, a few times a year” basis, you won’t ever see enough kids with it, to notice any of the rhyming, echoing, or patterns getting created.💖

                  **and “High Functioning” in Autism-world really is a misnomer!!

                  I’ve even seen it be completely misunderstood in the school district!!!

                  In Mental-Health Land, “High Functioning” and “Low Functioning” are supposed to be diagnostic terms only!!!

                  They basically refer to a person’s “overall set of skills to deal with the outside world” and they are only supposed to be used for beginning/basic “categorization” purposes (i.e., “Where do we start, when we bring this child into programming–how independently can they learn/speak/maneuver?”), they aren’t supposed to be used for anything past that, and they have ZERO “real world” application.

                  But too often in Ed?

                  Teachers and others try to use “high functioning” & “low functioning” to *mean* how a child actually functions in the world…

                  And those folks mistakenly believe that a child who’s “high functioning” needs less support than their “low functioning” peers.🙄😒😠😡🤬

                  When, in reality, they both need support, just supports that are tailored for *their own individual needs*

                  (Edited for typos!)

        • Those foxes turned out so cute too! Their different colour patterns were the most striking difference. I really wanted a fox when I was a kid but then I smelt their enclosure at the local Eco Museum…I wonder if the domesticated breeds don’t smell as bad.

  11. This is pretty fucked up!

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/dsu-state-leaders-incensed-team-090130195.html

    I am surprised/not surprised this idiot won after how his family robbed this country.  I remember when they came to Hawaii, I was almost arrested for yelling “fuck you Marcos” in front of his house at 2am when my friend and I were coming back from a club.  Cops were not impressed but sympathetic enough to let us go.  They used to close our high end retail stores for Imelda to shop by herself.  They drove around in Rolls Royces with a big security team.  They eventually had to move away from the roadside/beachside home that we could scream at them to a secluded compound.  Really though we were done with these fuckheads!

    https://www.thebiglead.com/posts/john-oliver-michael-jordan-fake-news-ferdinand-marcos-philippines-election-01g2mckfq7fp

     

    • …yeah…unless I’m mistaken that would be the same thing I quoted some stuff from the other day…& I think it makes a number of sound points

      …one of which is that it’d be pretty much impossible not to categorize shutting down fox news that way as censorship…& although to me that would be ok both in the sense of making the likes of carlson & hannity STFU…& also in the sense that one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other

      …I do see how that wouldn’t make any difference when the MAGA end of the right wing spectrum had the predictable kneejerk meltdown about it…or prevent them then going on to inflict the sort of censorship on legitimate outlets that they’d see as “equivalent”?

        • …oh, no need to apologize…I only meant that I might be repeating myself a little in that I think I quoted the part about freezing his assets being arguably justifiable but also hard not to describe as a form of censorship…more of a “feel free to ignore this part if it sounds like I said it before” than an “I think you’ll find I brought that up before” if that makes sense?

          …but yes…I’d be inclined to agree that in some cases refusing to allow calculated disinformation to masquerade as news seems more than warranted…but then I’m inclined to think that some people ought not to get to own certain sorts of things…so if I had my way murdoch wouldn’t be entitled to own a paper or a “news” channel the same way paul dacre wouldn’t have been…& elon wouldn’t be in the running for owner/CEO of twitter…but then if I had my way your mercers/kochs/peter thiel/aaron banks wouldn’t be able to convert cash to political puppet strings…manchin wouldn’t be eligible to hold office…MTG & her ilk wouldn’t be eligible to run for office…the list goes on…&…well…I guess I’d be on my way to finding out if a dictatorship could be benevolent…so it’s probably for the best that it isn’t up to me…quite apart from anything else that sounds like a lot of work?

  16. So, I can’t find the link to the lawyer that came up with this but I heard that if Roe is overturned and allowed to be determined by states that Biden could still allow them on federal lands in those states.  Go to a military base hospital for abortions?  It could be a workable loophole but I see it as a quicker route to a federal ban!  Actually, I just found this and forgive me if this has already been discussed…

    https://www.vox.com/2022/5/6/23060448/biden-white-house-roe-wade-abortion-rights

    • Until radical judges create state sovereign power over the federal government.

      The pundits are just not willing to recognize that the right wing judges are on a collision course with huge swaths of our institutions — including what the pundits themselves are allowed to say.

    • Speaking of that, *and* covid, Janet Yelled apparently weighed in on the economic impacts of repealing Roe:

      https://www.huffpost.com/entry/janet-yellen-abortion-economy_n_627a7a76e4b00fbab634226d

      The article’s quote from Tim Scott–in light of all the crap about how we haaaaaaad to get “Back to work–for the Economy!” even though folks were still getting sick & dying of covid, is head-bangingly frustrating, because of how hypocritical the R-side tends to be;

      “Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said he found Yellen’s comments troubling.

      ‘I think people can disagree on the issue of being pro-life or pro-abortion, but in the end, I think framing it in the context of labor force participation — it just feels callous to me,’ Scott said.”

  17. IDK what is going on but at least it wasn’t me who fell asleep on her laptop and forgot the Dot…at least not today.

    I’m working from home with a pukey cat who is going to the vet at 2:30.

    My cleaning ladies were here this morning so it’s been especially loud and traumatizing for everyone around here!

    Tots and pears for Fritz that we can get this inability to keep food down problem solved. Even if I give him a spoon full of food he hacks it up. 1 treat – yacks it up. And he’s obviously hungry so he’s extra mad. All his other functions are OK.

    • …speaking of gateways…it’s a funny thing…by which I mean I don’t find it even a little bit amusing but it does have more than its share of irony…but between susan calling the cops to deal with chalk on the sidewalk, the fences that popped up outside the court & brett-likes-beer’s feelings about his neighbors (among others) protesting outside his home the extreme double standard seems to escape some folks

      …maybe it’s just that brett wasn’t on the court when they decided that keeping anti-abortion protesters at least some distance from the doors to a clinic somehow infringed upon their 1st amendment rights

      https://www.theguardian.com/law/2014/jun/26/buffer-zone-rule-abortion-clinics-supreme-court

      …but if turnabout really is fair play I surely would love to see some of the tactics employed by those assholes come for brett & his pals in their place of work…what’s good for the goose & all that sort of thing?

  19. well…..that was a thing

    may have to alter my eurovision planning

    gotta move that slider a little more towards wine this year me thinks

    extra wine…savoury fatty snacks…yeah…that should probably do it

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