Me too! Caillebotte, IIRC.
Now pursuing whatever interests me after a career in journalism and international development. Formerly @rhamdu on Twitter.
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Me too! Caillebotte, IIRC.
They may be antlers but it's definitely horny
Why do people (Sainsbury's, for example) insist on calling Chinese cabbage "lettuce"?
This Zulu choir singing Bohemian Rhapsody on #BBCtoday is 🔥🔥
Pro tip: I file off the plastic latches, so you can slide the alarm off its base without first inserting a screwdriver in a tiny slot. It makes those 3AM battery changes much easier.
This year I have almost forgotten what heavy rain is like. But now it's bucketing down. Patchy showers are forecast today. Right now there is one heavy downpour on the GB map. It's moving E along the Sussex coast. I can confirm that the radar isn't wrong.
Amazing new idea. A single heatpump for winter heating and summer cooling. From Scientific American April 1978.
What is your take on reported experiences of ego dissolution?
My first thought was: that would be a good day to find out what it is like to die. Foiled by the "including your memory" clause!
Matthew Syed's #bbcradio4 doc on time expansion experiences is a slow motion car crash between science and pseudoscience, and I hope science is gonna come out alive www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
#physics
It's "every day I have the blues" not "everyday I have the blues"
A whole nother thing is an abso blooming lutely normal English construction.
Sneak peek not sneak peak
I have approximately 1% of Chick Corea's technique, passion and improvisational genius, so I'm going to see if I can, in some limited sense, play like him.
My electric toothbrush pauses every 30 seconds, allegedly to remind me to change position. But I know that those pauses are really ad breaks, and one day they will be filled by actual advertisements.
When Descartes is mentioned I expect to be told about yet another thing he got wrong. This favourable mention of Descartes provokes a sense of, maybe not actual wonder, but definitely surprise.
...and our ears discovered the principle before mathematicians did
Many websites try to explain the lyrics of Can's One More Night but miss the obvious symbolism of the 7/4 vamp: the endless cycle of weeks, each ending disappointingly in "one more Saturday night". music.youtube.com/watch?v=t-AH...
We are beginning to get a grip on possibly the biggest problem in growth and development, which is, how things come out the right shape and size. Through evolution, the genome has acquired tacit knowledge of physics and chemistry.
We are beginning to get a grip on possibly the biggest problem in growth and development, which is, how things come out the right shape and size. Through evolution, the genome has acquired tacit knowledge of physics and chemistry.
A London taxi driver, who got lost on a trip into the far suburbs, apologised to me with this quote from your fellow genius Albert Einstein: “As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.”
Every account of traditional Pacific navigation techniques that I have read has gaps: points where they either can't say, or won't say how they know something. There may be tacit knowledge that is as mysterious to them as it is to westerners.
Yeah you could get daily deliveries of silica gel and pay someone to take the used stuff away💰💰💰. In cool wet places like western Ireland a dehumidifier is nice even in summer. But I guess where you are, you don't want the heat a DH puts out. And if you had air conditioning, obvs you wouldna asked.
Still thinking about this. Remembering a 1980s encounter with Ed Fredkin who thought the universe might be a cellular automation. The first big hurdle is to explain how relativistic spacetime emerges from the absolute space and time of the CA world. (CA => finite c, but not relativistically.)
Finally got my euros from the Post Office. They were sitting in the branch for days but staff could not release them. Computer said no. Somebody (me?) must have done something that tripped a security mechanism. After multiple calls between me, branch and two offices, the handover was authorised.
I try to guard my data, but I still get targeted advertisements, and this time the product is absolutely ME. I want it. It's like COVID. You can avoid it for a while but it gets you in the end.
I'd like to defend Wolfram because his first paper on 1D CA was brilliant, and Mathematica is my PL of choice. Plus I am a fan of CA as metaphor and art form. But 'all is cellular automata' is an odd hill to die on. CA models some bits of physics, others absolutely not. No Kuhnian revolution here.
The thorn section: this is our cactus Dizzy, opened today for a short season.
In horror films when there's a demon problem they always get a Catholic priest to sort it out. European classical musicians tend to see themselves as the Catholic priests of music, the theoreticians of last resort.
Nah, too easy.
OK, the sample was tiny and the potential applications are distasteful. But can someone explain why the hypothesis itself is intrinsically implausible? Physiognomy was essentialist. This isn't.
Trump wields the tariff weapon like a medieval jester with a pig's bladder, as a way of infuriating other countries without doing them serious violence.
They definitely smuggled no budgies.
I just love the way this one rumbles on. Any patterns emerging? Does it depend on the genre a musician is from? Any other other examples of songs people can't agree on?
Yes. I've had the same thought myself :) bsky.app/profile/rham...
Tell me you are smarter than me without telling me you are smarter than me.
It may have been BBC news that got it wrong. They changed the wording on the 8am bulletin and talked about speed of delivery, not frequency.
Surprising that Royal Mail thinks it can save £400M by delivering 2nd class mail alternate weekdays, considering that posties will still have to do their rounds daily with 1st class. Perhaps RM's real agenda is to devalue 2nd class to a junk mail service and make 1st class the norm.
Does anybody in the UK record cloudless days or keep statistics on them? With satellites, it should be easy. You might argue that the difference between a cloudless day and a merely sunny day is insignificant for the economy or public health. All I know is we don't get many of them.
Can't remember who posted about this, but thanks, even for non snooker followers it's a brilliant essay on the nature of skill #motorcontrol www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
As a row breaks out over the meat content of free school meals: just a reminder that meat-eating is a cultural norm, not a nutritional necessity.
Thanks! I should have remembered bass. I'm old enough to remember when Jaco Pastorius popularised the fretless bass sound. But fretless guitars are new to me.
There are IKEA pillowcases on eBay for more than you would pay at IKEA. It may be because IKEA are so crap at maintaining stock for delivery.
Migrating my two Xitter identities to Bluesky turns out to be harder than moving my life to a new city. I don't see X becoming a cesspool of hate because I don't follow those people. What I see is a resilient community of interesting, humane people who somehow ignore Elon and carry on.
Trombone is the only acoustic instrument I can think of that exists in versions with or without tuning assistance. Any valve trombone players wanna comment?
One of our international Emergencies staff, a doctor, was at a hotel in Tavistock Square. Casualties were brought in, and Unnikrishnan helped to treat them. The media wanted witnesses, and as the comms team we decided to offer Unni's story, if we could avoid looking like shameless opportunists.
This day in 2005 London bus and Tube services were disrupted by suicide bombings. My train terminated in the suburbs leaving me a long ride on my folding bike to work at ActionAid.
I suspect Microsoft killed the pencil tool because it was hungry for resources if over-used. Even though memory and CPU power increase every year.
But the other thing I have discovered, after updating to the current version of OneNote, is that the pencil tool has gone. I used it all the time, for softer lines, fuzzy and foggy effects. I think I might revert to the old version, even if it will soon be unsupported. 😱WHY DO THEY DO THESE THINGS?
Trying out the 'laser pointer' tool in Microsoft OneNote. Draw a shape. A second or so later, it vanishes. You can scribble all over the page, non-destructively. It's actually better than a laser pointer because of the slight persistence. Great if you are doing a presentation or video with OneNote.
The 'carpentered world' theory may not explain the Mueller-Lyer illusion, but it still seems a good explanation for the cultural differences In interpretation of the 'coffer' image shown above.
Another call centre, more Vivaldi on hold. We would value The Four Seasons better, if the only way to hear it was to travel to Venice and attend a live performance in a baroque church.
Interesting argument and detailed analysis! But I'm not sure everyone will accept the distinction between experiencing and noticing, on which it all hangs.
What can the behaviour of supermarket shoppers tell us about how we form habits and learn skills? www.researchgate.net/publication/...
Finally, if you're thinking what I'm thinking, this framework begs comparison with the Free Energy Principle. All information-theoretic approaches to cognition boil down to the same 3-word summary: dude, it's entropy.
Example 2: If (big if!) we 'think in' natural language or mentalese there is still the mystery of how I get from "uh-oh, rhino charging" to "up tree, fast!" But maybe the strength of Martinez's model is that it abstracts all that messy thinking into the clean, simple concept of distortion reduction.
Example 1: Kosslyn's conclusions on visual thinking would require a representation of geometry which not only meets Martinez's rate-distortion-complexity criterion but is *manipulable*, enabling is to 'turn things around in our mind'.
Usual caveats about the very concept of representation, but this paper is a really nice take on it, with testable implications. Everything we'd call 'thinking' is abstracted away. What matters here is that if the thinking is done right, information passes from sensory to motor without distortion.
I've said it before. Apples in philosophical and psychological writing are always red. Though that's probably not the main reason why we see this apple as red. This is an example of colour constancy - another aspect of brain-as-scientist. A plain red sphere would have created the same visual effect.
Once again BBC news shows Brighton beach, which might make you think it's sweltering here. It's actually 26C right now. Brighton is where Londoners come to cool off when it's 33C in the capital.
I wasn't advancing my own opinion so much as questioning the AI's assumptions 😉. FWIW my Irish relatives (by marriage) include rugby and Gaelic football players, and some, though not all, would be considered on the well-built side.
Prompted by the news that Wimbledon no longer has line judges. Perception involves both prediction and retrodiction. In judging where a ball bounced, humans use its path both before and after the bounce. Theories of #perception based purely on prediction are missing half the story. #psychology
I'd like to turn this around and ask why cephalopods, having evolved intelligence through predator-prey interactions, didn't apply their smarts to developing a more social way of life? Perhaps if you have eight arms, you never need to ask a friend to lend a hand.
They are pints. Don't you know how big Irish people are?
GLASTON is an anagram of NOSTALG
Assuming pacifism isn't the only acceptable position, how bad does the IDF have to get before it's OK to wish death on it? #glastonbury
OK. But do they have evidence that Mancunians start falling over in the heart three degrees before Londoners do?
Do we even need a formal definition of a heatwave? The UK Met Office thinks we do. It's complicated. The threshold temperature, which must be reached on three consecutive days, varies across the country. Even the highest threshold, 28C, may seem low to people in warmer countries. Heat is relative.
During lockdown I joined a Zoom course on jazz composers and arrangers. The session on Lalo Schifrin left me wondering why I didn't know more about this brilliant musician and his astonishing career.
Chemists are super aware of the need to homogenise reaction mixtures and avoid hot spots. Swirling a conical flask is in every chemist's muscle memory. Magnetic stirrers can work all night, but it turns out they are not that great at their basic job of mixing.
Hors concours: microtonalism
"Do not ask what your country can do for you. Ask what your country can do for America."
The hippocampus is becoming so like a brain within the brain that perhaps it should be called the homocampunculus.
You can know what a watt is, that a kW is 1000 watts and that a MW is 1000kW, but all in vain if you have no feel for what a thousand is. Unfortunately, 1000 is rather a large number to represent graphically, and 1M is virtually impossible.
London cabbies have to absorb a lot of data when 'doing the knowledge'. But must each driver independently develop their own route-finding technique? Or are they taught specific methods, just as Pacific Island navigators are during their training?
London cabbies have to absorb a lot of data when 'doing the knowledge'. But must each driver independently develop their own route-finding technique? Or are they taught specific methods, just as Pacific Island navigators are during their training?
Spot on. I don't know romance but I read a bit of crime. If AI wrote Elmore Leonard plots in generic style it wouldn't be worth reading. If AI could write decent, but formulaic, plots in Elmore Leonard's style, I might be convinced.
I found a free 18-month-old article about Inkitt techcrunch.com/2024/02/26/i... Amazon thi is it can find a book you'll like. Inkitt thinks it can write a book you'll like. There are *many* ways AI + humans could create novels together, but in one possible future, each book has only one reader.
Perhaps they had hotter-running biochemistry, idk. Heat that is life-threatening for us may have been comfortable for them. Rationally I accept that, but still I can't I imagine being a cod, living comfortably in 5C seawater. If nothing else, you have hit a psychological truth here.
Blast of tinnitus-like noise from the radio could mean two things. 1: BBC has gone off the air. The apocalypse has begun. 2: It's a royal birthday. A drum roll precedes the national anthem.
Was it really a wet night in the Channel Islands? The @metoffice.gov.uk app shows a patch of light rain, suspiciously static for several hours while other rain moves with the wind. No hills to explain it. Non-meteorological explanations would include a faulty radar or a data glitch.
I wish auctioneers wouldn't refer to the 'hammer price' of glass and china lots.
Just keep it first-order, mate.
This is the smartest damn thing I’ve heard all year. If nothing else, it might serve to erode employers‘ trust in ChatGPT.
How quickly does he expect it to kill him?
Wow, looks like a rich blend of words and images. When I was a chemistry student the 'pop' view was that alchemy was magic, the opposite of chemistry. The 'scholarly' view was that alchemy was proto-chemistry, a rational enterprise waiting for a theory. I simplify. But is that still a fair summary?
To be entirely fair the DNNs should have been shown locomotion opportunities such as WiFi routers and USB sticks.
Experience with 2D pictures. But also experience of 3D environments. DNNs were rubbish at perceiving locomotive affordances. They had been trained on 2D images without our opportunities as humans with years of negotiating the physical world. Embodied cognition folks won't find this surprising.
The kind of magic you expect from connectionist AI, not actual brains 😉
War is always bad for the environment. It's worse when oil installations are attacked, and worse still when nuclear installations are the target.
I read this and thought, surely this is unnecessary advice. Who could possibly get SPFs so wrong? Then I remembered Donald Trump and his 400% reductions.
"Linguistic synesthesia" is a kind of metaphor. Cross-modal metaphor, perhaps. But not synesthetic metaphor. No actual synesthesia is involved. Arguably the example "smooth melody" isn't even cross-modal, if you regard smoothness as a physical property r/t a sensation. Interesting subject, though!
I've now reached the Transmitter article, thanks. Using laptop rather than phone seemed to help. I have great respect for the flying abilities of Drosophila. When there is a fruit fly in our kitchen, catching it is always a challenge.
Yay, I will definitely watch this, or at least watch my retinas watching it, because lectures #11 and #12 are at the flinty heart of Turveyan weirdness.
Sadly I couldn't find a way to read Bradley Dickerson's article without answering a survey first. At least I think I have found Pringle's original 1948 paper on fly halteres royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
Looks like this call was escalated to a supervisor.
Looks interesting. Gotta say I prefer the "skull bound scientist" formulation, which suggests we can largely trust our perceptions, to "controlled hallucination" which suggests that we can't. But then, people (including Nobel committees) love reading about how our brains get things totally wrong.
If you think 5 minute emails are bad, try 10 minute surveys.
