The pandemic: 1 year later

This month, we passed our pandemicversary, or as I like to think of it, our annivirusary. This occurs on a different day for different people. For me, it’s when March Meeting, the largest physics conference in the world, was cancelled on March 2nd. The pandemic caused major changes in many of our lives, often not for the better. But, I’d like to reflect back on the lighter and more positive aspects.

1. I started exercising. At first, it was because my husband could no longer use the gym, so he bought some home gym equipment. Later, my mother started teaching Zumba online.

[Read more…]

Link Roundup: March 2021

The monthly link roundup is just a few links this time.  But first, a plug to the journal club that I organize monthly.  Last month, we read an article about incels and asexuality, and I thought some readers might enjoy that.

What it was like to be a doctor during the AIDS crisis | Psychology Today – Alan interviews a doctor.  I’m way too young to remember the AIDS pandemic (ongoing though it is), but its impact on gay culture is immense, so I value these primary historical accounts.

Tracing the Roots of Pop Culture Transphobia | Lindsay Ellis (video, 59 min) – Isn’t it odd how transphobes fixate on this narrative of trans women assaulting women in bathrooms?  I mean, it’s not impossible, but it’s a rather unrepresentative view of oh wait they got it from the movies, didn’t they?  I remember when vomit reactions to trans women was a common trope.  And when I remember this, I think, fiction is such bullshit, we should stop making fiction forever.

Old Scott Alexander email links him to the alt-right | r/sneerclub – It’s drama that you’d only care about if you’re familiar with the Rationalist community.  There was a hullabaloo in the Rationalist community because the NYT published a mediocre article on Scott Alexander.  Then someone leaked a private e-mail from Scott Alexander in 2014 where he expresses his belief in HBD (what we’d call race science), among other ridiculous things.  I thought we already knew Scott was into race science?  My favorite part was where he says he can’t dismiss things that sound absurd, because he believes in cryonics!

BTW some FTB oldtimers may recognize the recipient & leaker of the e-mail under a different …uncredible… name.

The contentiousness of womxn

cn: It’s about language, so don’t complain to me about wasting time with pointless semantics, it was your choice to read onward!

“Womxn” is a term that was intended to be more inclusive of trans women, nonbinary people, and women of color. It recently entered the news when Twitch used “womxn” in a tweet. This resulted in backlash, with people accusing the term of being transphobic. It is a term that inspires, shall we say, conflicting viewpoints.

I first heard about “womxn” in the context of TERFs complaining about it. I don’t exactly watch TERFs, but my husband, you see, likes to argue with TERFs on Twitter. Yes, yes, there’s no accounting for taste. In any case, TERFs would complain endlessly about “womxn”, seemingly in disproportion to its actual use. This is common practice in TERF communities, to highlight something said somewhere by some trans person, and amplify everywhere as an example of why the TRAs (their term for trans activists, intended to parallel MRAs) are bad.

[Read more…]

Poe’s Law is and always was bad

It’s time for another trip to the ruins of New Atheism, to scavenge for clues about its downfall. Today we examine Poe’s Law, an adage that states that there is no parody of religious fundamentalism so extreme that it won’t be mistaken for the real thing.

This episode was inspired by a video by Sarah Z (1 hr), about a seemingly unrelated topic: made up stories on Tumblr. The central thread in her video is an obviously fictional story on Tumblr about a woman giving money to a homeless man, and being interrupted by a fedora’d dipshit. And with one thing and another it ends with a Gangnam Style dance number.

This tumblr story was posted to Reddit, where it was a joke about tumblr SJWs make shit up to reinforce their own persecution complex, and have so little attachment to reality that they believe their own nonsense.

The story isn’t just fake though. It’s a fake fake story. The story was not created by a tumblr SJW, and was in fact never posted on Tumblr in the first place. The screenshot was engineered by an apparently anti-SJW redditor who habitually created fake screenshots along similar lines. So in truth, it’s a story about how anti-SJWs make up shit to reinforce their own worldview, and have so little attachment to reality that they believe their own nonsense.

[Read more…]

Origami: Orb

orb

Business Card Origami Orb, designed by Jeannine Mosely, with modification by me

This model has instructions online, and is one of the easiest curved-crease models to create.  It just requires six business cards or some other card stock paper, and some means to draw circles.  The instructions suggest using a compass or a template, but I just used a poker chip that I had on hand.  Once you draw the circles, you should score them, which can be done by pressing hard on a ballpoint pen.

[Read more…]

Computational complexity of jigsaw puzzles

During the pandemic, I started doing more jigsaw puzzles. Not real puzzles mind you—I found a jigsaw simulator on Steam that was fairly authentic to the real experience. And since I was doing jigsaw puzzles through the medium of video games, I couldn’t help but think about them in the context of puzzle video games. I realized, jigsaw puzzles are kind of weird! In your typical puzzle video game, the ideal is to have a set of levels, each of which require some crucial insight. In contrast, a jigsaw puzzle is more like a large task that you chip away at.

One way of thinking about this is through the lens of computational complexity. Take Sokoban, the classic block pushing puzzle upon which many puzzle video games are founded. In general, a Sokoban puzzle of size N requires exp(N) time to solve, in the worst case. However, the typical Sokoban puzzle does not present the worst case, it presents a curated selection of puzzles that can be solved more quickly. This gives the solver an opportunity to feel clever, rather than just performing a computation.

Jigsaw puzzles, on the other hand, are about performing a computation. And, if you wish to do a large jigsaw puzzle in a reasonable amount of time, you look for ways to perform that computation efficiently. This raises the question: what is the computational complexity of a jigsaw puzzle?

According to the open access paper, “No easy puzzles: Hardness results for jigsaw puzzles” by Michael Brand, realistic jigsaw puzzles require Θ(N2) steps both in the worst case and on average. On the other hand, this is not born out by my own statistics, which seem to fit a straight line.

[Read more…]

Art, success, and rewards

I recently read a story where an artist sold a recording for a flat fee, and then the song went on to become hugely popular, but the artist didn’t receive any royalties. It’s a familiar story of exploitation, especially of Black artists who systematically receive less credit than they are due in American music.

However, I was distracted by an alternative interpretation that came to mind. To some extent, the rights to royalties for a song is essentially a lottery ticket. Song popularity follows a power law distribution (I presume, based on how these things usually work), so that a few songs become extremely successful while the vast majority remain in obscurity. It makes sense to want to sell your lottery ticket–provided that you get a fair price for it. If you have a losing ticket–as most people do–then selling that losing ticket is a way to still make money.

[Read more…]