gattsuru
2yr ago
The Iran Deal was, separately from the geopolitics, also a pretty major effort by the executive branch to bypass any limits on its spending or treaty powers, as well as to hide from outside scrutiny period. It's not like they just sent John Kerry to futz around and a deal just spilled out.
I'm doubtful Obama would have put it as a top-five and maybe not even as a top-ten in terms of things he'd highlight from his presidency (Ben Rhodes, on the other hand...), but in terms of something that took a ton of political capital and seemed to get outsized focus for what it could have returned even had Iran actually intended to hold to it, I think Samuel's summary is pretty reasonable.
Replication of the semi-floating behavior, but (very) high (and increasing with decreasing temperature) resistance and evidence of ferromagnetism in addition to unusually high diagmagnetic behavior from a Chinese group. Their theory involves a complex scenario of ferromagnetic (maybe ferrimagnetic?) forces causing the specific half-floating behavior through torque, without much relevant impact from the large diagmagnetic components -- definitely a weird physics thing in general, and doubly so for a compound where none of the input ingredients were ferromagnetic (and many not even paramagnetic: lead, copper, and solid sulfur are all diamagnetic), but not something quite so obviously useful.
I'd be interested to see further experimentation, but it's a big impact in favor of 'weird and genuine thing, but not superconductivity' side. On the other hand, the difference between their temp vs resistance graph and most other replications is surprising : erroneous zero or near zero values are pretty common with resistance measures, but you don’t usually see entirely different slopes, which leaves open questions about contamination.
gattsuru
2yr ago
And another claimed semi-replication by randos, supposedly using a different approach and getting their sample entirely floating off the surface. It still looks a little different than most flux pinning examples I can find, but going to need either someone to scale up meaningful production sizes, or a more specialized lab looking at other traits used to identify superconductivity.
gattsuru
2yr ago
The Colorado Gazette reports:
The Department of Education is withholding federal funding from hunting and archery programs in schools, citing a bipartisan law passed last year that tightened restrictions around gun purchases in the wake of a deadly school shooting in Texas.
A spokesperson for the Department of Education said that the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, passed in the wake of the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, requires the department to withhold certain grant funds from archery and hunting programs in schools, according to Fox News.
"The prohibition went into effect immediately on June 25, 2022, and applies to all existing and future awards under all ESEA programs," the department told the outlet. "The department is administering the bipartisan law as written by Congress."
The specific provision in the act was an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that prohibits federal funds from going to programs that "provide to any person a dangerous weapon or training in the use of a dangerous weapon."
It's not clear if this was the actual intent: some of the Senators that sponsored that particular amendment claim that it wasn't, and they can credibly point to Democratic concerns that school resource officer funding being used to arm on-school police. Of course, the senators voicing concerns were the supposedly pro-gun side of the legislative debate; a different sponsor considered the entire bill "an exercise in sheer brute political force".
It's also not clear that matters. Legislative intent isn't exactly in vogue, and even if it were, the structure of judicial review for funding decisions make it exceptionally difficult for a challenge to survive first contact with the courts. Congress could change the law to be more specific... but I'd bet that they won't.
ESEA funds are not the whole source of funding for local schools and other covered groups, or even the sole source of federal funding. Schools that want to keep running archery and hunter education programs might be able to redistribute state spending from other matters, though they'll face extra scrutiny. Schools that don't will have a lot of reasons to absolutely smother these programs. And there's a lot more of the latter than the former.
I've spoken before about an older version of this problem, but it's also worth pointing out that, contemporaneously to the bill's discussion, this wasn't even on the list of concerns. But it seems interesting beyond that as a boring and trite example of the by-all-means war over institutions and culture, no matter the cost to civil trust.
First publicly claimed partial replication of magnetic weirdness in America. Very small size compared to the input materials, and seems weirdly shiny compared to a lot of other attempts, which points to at least a difference in manufacturing.
There are still non-superconducting explanations -- the magnetic measurements could be 'just' extremely strong diamagnetism, and even the efforts to attempt resistivity and critical current measurements from other groups have not been amazing so far. But it at least drastically reduces the odds that this is a simple fraud.
There have also been some interesting failures to replicate.
A claimed Chinese replication including superconductivity... to 110K. Not outside of the realm of other past ambient-temp high-temperature superconductors (though higher than YBCO). This could plausibly represent manufacturing faults lowering max temp, or measurement faults giving false reads of superconductivity
If true. Also starting to see more jokes or grifts.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Yes, I'd expect @RandomRanger's argument is more "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?", where the decision to have laws one direction and not the other is an explicit choice, and one that undermines the legitimacy of the law.
There's even a hybrid steelman that points out that even where the actual text of a rule is broken by those favored, or where the disfavored are technically within operating within text of the law, or where a 'law' wasn't actually passed in accordance with the rules, new interpretations and concepts and exceptions and excuses precipitate out of thin air or it turns out that no one can ever have standing.
But if your position is that Trump's prosecution should be deliminated solely on the matter that "Either he committed a crime, or he didn't", it's relevant whether other people at similar levels of power committed a crime, or didn't.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I don't agree with the position, but there were quite a lot of claims that Bush et all pushed and continued the Iraq War through false information provided to Congress, as well as concealed information (both on request, and from general scrutiny) in ways that violate other (if poorly enforced) laws, or by selectively (sometimes unlawfully) leaking information.
Not every alleged lie or concealed matter in question was before Congress in a way subject to 18 USC 1001, or otherwise obviously unlawful or wrong enough to trigger the 'corruptly' prong; not every claim was presented to "obstruct, influence, or impede' an official proceeding. But many people claimed that there were enough, especially by the standards presented in this indictment.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I don't know why you are conflating "doing bad things" with "doing illegal things." They are not the same thing, not in the US or anywhere else. Maybe they should be the same, but they aren't.
In this case, one of the illegal things is "Whoever corruptly (1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or (2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so." Another is conspiring with others to do that. And "official proceeding" includes, in part, literally any "a proceeding before the Congress" or "a proceeding before a Federal Government agency which is authorized by law".
There have, to be very blunt, been a lot of intentional lies and concealed records from Congress, done knowingly and in many cases for personal political gain. There are ways to cordon of this particular matter as the only time that the statute need be used this way, and huadpe has tried to do so (and I'm sure if pressed enough on the gaps, will eventually come up with a fine enough reference class). But there's little if any reason for anyone to think these chalk lines matter, compared to the text.
gattsuru
2yr ago
gattsuru
2yr ago
I think courts have held that either knowing what they were doing is wrong or that it is unlawful are sufficient, and the final charges will probably hammer each option separately. But yeah.
gattsuru
2yr ago
One of the previous J6-related trials used these pretrial statements, which defined the matter as :
To act “corruptly,” the defendant must use independently unlawful means or act with an unlawful purpose, or both. The defendant must also act with “consciousness of wrongdoing.” “Consciousness of wrongdoing” means with an understanding or awareness that what the person is doing is wrong or unlawful.
Not all attempts to obstruct or impede an official proceeding involve acting corruptly. For example, a witness in a court proceeding may refuse to testify by invoking his or her constitutional privilege against self-incrimination, thereby obstructing or impeding the proceeding, but that person does not act corruptly. In addition, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution affords people the right to speak, assemble, and petition the Government for grievances. Accordingly, an individual who does no more than lawfully exercise those rights does not act corruptly. In contrast, an individual who obstructs or impedes a court proceeding by bribing a witness to refuse to testify in that proceeding, or by engaging in other independently unlawful conduct, does act corruptly. Often, acting corruptly involves acting with the intent to secure an unlawful advantage or benefit either for oneself or for another person.
There's a fun philosophical question about how much Trump can be said to "know" anything, but the indictment's got a lot of people telling Trump he lost and didn't have a legal way to stay in office; it's at least enough to go to a jury on this specific question.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Regarding FLCL: I can’t tell which parts of the linked comments you’re saying are wrong.
From prokopetz:
There’s a reason that the climax of Naota’s character arc comes not when he successfully channels the power of Atomsk and defeats the evil space robots, but later on, when he explicitly rejects both Mamimi and Haruko and takes notice of Ninamori’s attraction to him, thereby symbolically overcoming the damaging ideals the former pair represent and successfully connecting with a peer who can reciprocate his interest in a healthy and appropriate way.
The climactic moment of last episode of FLCL proper -- the very next sentence from Naota's mouth after he takes the power of the Pirate King, defeats (more accurately 'effortlessly obliterates') the evil robots, and confronts Haruko -- is to explicitly to pull his attack and to tell Haruko "I love you".
It's not a healthy love in any way, or a reciprocated one, or one compatible with The Pirate King's powers (while not out at the time, FLCL Progressive would eventually spend two and a half hours working its way up to joke that Atomysk cock-blocks Haruko; you can wince at the pun). Haruko turns Naota down the very next two sentences: he is, after all, just a kid. But the very point of the story depends on Naota loving Haruko enough that her rejection is unpleasant and something he's been unwilling to risk. The 'NO' metaphor is all of that something awful can and indeed likely will happen when you try, whether for a game or to seek romance. A different NO activation, when Naota confronts Mamimi knowing that she does not love him, does not just cause Mamimi to reject him, but it nearly causes the end of the world!
But Naota learns to do it anyway, because it was only festering otherwise, and because it was important to do on its own (hence the satellite weapon episode, even as Naota tried and failed there).
((And this is still a work-in-progress even as the story ends: I think prokopetz overstates how well Naota is responding to Ninamori in the closing scene.))
gattsuru
2yr ago
Last week, Sioux Falls specifically hit 100F (37C); for most of January 2023, you were near or below freezing, with 15-20 mph winds. And the last couple years have been relatively mild: 2020 sucked. By contrast, Belgrade, Sofia City.
gattsuru
2yr ago
And a guardedly-optimistic summary from Derek Lowe.
gattsuru
2yr ago
It's also regularly questioned why The Major uses a female chassis, with even other members of her own team spelling out that a male chassis allows for greater muscular strength. Her counterpoint is to beat Batou with his own fists. For a while, fan theories thought she might have been AMAB before cyberization, although 2nd Gig very heavily implies that she was the "little girl" that was a fellow plane crash survivor to Kuze (though diehard fans of trans Makoto suggest she'd started IDing as female at that age).
gattsuru
2yr ago
A claimed Chinese replication at very small scale and low purity showing reaction to magnet, some fascinating theoretical approximations that have give a weakly plausible theory, albeit with many limitations, and a number of failed replication attempts. Manifold's floating 40%+ for replication by 2025; I'm a little more skeptical than that, still, but I'm not sure I'm skeptical enough to sell at those prices.
gattsuru
2yr ago
But to the trans-ness being invisible. The platonic ideal of a trans man is someone who everyone looks at and says "yes, that is a man, I have no doubt in my mind", and then never thinks twice about. The "trans" part, ideally, vanishes. And this makes it really easy to put a trans man in a game or a movie: you just put a man in.
Eh... I don't know how much that reals, rather than operates as the spherical-cow frictionless-plane comparison. To whatever extent that platonic ideal might be possible in a kinda world, we're often not making media about those.
Like, as an example plucked from nowhere, if Rimworld was going to implement trans characters, it'd actually have a pretty significant impact on play!
Trans_humanist_ characters used to suffer a -4 mood until body modded, which wasn't a huge deal but could make low-tech runs or early play a lot more fragile. After the Ideology update made transhumanism require a handful of precepts that maxed out around -16 mood if pawns couldn't get their desired therapies, which was often enough to tantrum spiral a base.
That's probably not exactly where you'd want to aim for, but as someone without that great an understanding of the game's balance, I could see something like a -2 or -4 for cis or trans characters wearing clothes that don't match their gender identity or don't match their ideology's expected wear for their gender identity, -6 for a trans character not receiving gender therapy, and some +2-+6 range for having resolved that. And there's be other mechanical impacts like ability to be pregnant/impregnate another pawn, or some of the lower-tech-tier gender therapies could have medical ramifications (cfe real-world transmen being advised to have hysterectomies if they stay on testosterone long), which could be mitigated with some of the higher-tech research levels and eventually archanotech just being the magic gender pill. ((Yes, there are problems with this modeling, not least of all that. Tbf, the problems with Rimworld's original romance system were far from limited to just sexual orientation.))
Okay, so Rimworld's a little bit of a cheat, because colony sims generally require you have a lot of relatively deep information about all of your characters, and even pawns opposed to your faction you want to have a lot of detail because you might try to kidnap and brainwash recruit them.
What about CRPGs, which Bioware is at least aping towards? There's some controversy over when, if ever, trans people should disclose to romantic partners, and that's a fun question on its own. And despite some recent confusion about what "bear" means in the gay community, chances are pretty good you're not going to have every character in a game be romancable. But a lot of the constraints above apply. People surprised by an external disaster might have complications getting access to even common medications. Privacy can be limited in a lot of ways, especially at lower-incomes or going further back in history
And, conversely, other constraints might not. In a more trans-friendly environment -- indeed, in many trans-heavy spaces today -- a lot of trans people will make off-the-cuff jokes about parents applying expectations, because they don't necessarily mean full disclosure but even if someone picks up on the hints it's not going to be that big a deal.
I'm trying to figure out how I would make either characters that are never called attention to, or characters that are an allegory . . . for trans people.
Have you seen Brand New Animal? It's not a great series -- the central mystery feels a little rushed, despite or perhaps because of a good few early episodes being a little filler-like -- but the way it handles a lot of these problems is interesting.
Trans stuff is not the only read, and many others are brought forward for individual episodes. Sometimes much more explicit and very specific ones: there's a full episode that's partly about Michiru learning her powers, but also about the then-whites-only-league Black Sox scandal, which is hilariously specific). But it's a very plausible read for the broader story, and it points to the sort of design space that's possible.
A little bit of that is because of the trappings -- graduating high school, suddenly feeling massively different from everyone around you, going to a festival where you can be finally yourself in public, gradually going from denial to recognition, and then trying to figure out how (and if) you actually fit into this new community or what extent you could be comfortable going back to your previous one are all very common across LG and B and T communities -- but they're not actually about taking estrogen or crushing on another girl (as much as shippers might go nuts over a few scenes).
In this case, the plot is about something, but it's not necessarily about any one thing. That's not true representation in the strict sense, but it leaves it possible for a work to have applicability for environments or people the authors may never have been familiar with; better yet, you can have reason for people from a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds to feel sympathy to your metaphor.
((Star Trek's Let That Be Your Last Battlefield touches on this a little bit, if probably more intentionally for deniability: Lokai and Bele butt heads the most over slavery and revolution, but Bele is also the chief officer of the Commission on Political Traitors, which makes a lot more sense in entirely different contexts than racial politics.))
That said, it's usually easier with an understanding, and often a pretty deep understanding, of what sort of broad sensations that feel relevant and common for the represented group.
Of course, this vagueness or openness has its costs. FLCL's main gimmick is "NO", the power to summon robots and energy creatures, described in-universe as tension between the right and left hemispheres of the brain but actually about interpersonal tension and self-concealed interests, and no matter how explicitly the media makes it some one will misread it. Or for a more concrete example, over on Tumblr StormingTheIvory loved My Little Pony for a lot of its applicability for trans-related stuff despite not actually featuring any trans character because she found resonance with Big Macintosh... until the show put him in a dress as a punchline.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Not sure what's going on at that level. Most people seem convinced that the South Korean lab must be sending out samples for testing, or at least talking in person with MIT-level experts, but outside of saying that it's planned I've not seen much. The sorta people who have big XRD toolkits don't tend to spend too much time speculating on twitter, though.
gattsuru
2yr ago
The original protocol is trivial by superconductor (or even semiconductor!) research standards, but it's still filled with a number of individual materials that are expensive, controlled, or absolutely aren't safe to run in an apartment, along with a couple steps that require a long time with uncommon tooling. Iris_IGB's proposed approach cuts out some nasty chemicals and nearly half of the synthesis time; she probably just wouldn't have tried the original protocol at all.
Of course, optimizations only help if it works...
gattsuru
2yr ago
Funnest update of the week so far: lesbian Russian catgirl replication in an apartment, with a pile of scraps. I've no idea how to guess whether this is real or not, but either way it is hilarious.
gattsuru
2yr ago
It's funny, but I'm not sure the actual data is useful. Procedurally, the question was
Imagine that Patricia is a parent, who hires Blake as a babysitter to watch Patricia’s young children for two days and one night over the weekend, from Saturday morning to Sunday night. Patricia walks out the door, hands Blake a credit card, and says: “Use this credit card to make sure the kids have fun this weekend.”
[MISUSE] Blake only uses the credit card to rent a movie that only he watches; Blake does not use the card to buy anything for the children.
[MINOR] Blake does not use the credit card at all. Blake plays card games with the kids.
[REASONABLE] Blake uses the credit card to buy the children pizza and ice cream and to rent a movie to watch together.
[MAJOR] Blake uses the credit card to buy the children admission to an amusement park and a hotel; Blake takes the children to the park, where they spend two days on rollercoasters and one night in a hotel.
[EXTREME] Blake uses the credit card to hire a professional animal entertainer, who brings a live alligator to the house to entertain the children.
They asked 500 online participants, who were paid 1 USD/hour, and ~475ish completed the questionaire in a useful way. Of those, the average answer was:
Case Was the rule violated? Was the action reasonable (7) or unreasonable (1)?
Reasonable 0% 6.84 (Most reasonable)
Minor 49% 5.83 (Reasonable)
Major 8% 4.68 (Reasonable)
Misuse 85% 3.32 (Unreasonable)
Extreme 10% 3.12 (Unreasonable)
So, yes, Major scenarios were considered far less clearly unreasonable than the Misuse or Extreme scenarios. But they weren't considered as reasonable as simply ignoring the instruction entirely (even if this was considered a clearer violation of the rule), and even the most extremely unreasonable (live gator!) didn't actually get a score near 1 or count as a clear violation of the rule for more than 10% of the viewers. That's probably just a result of centrality bias and the experimental setup, but it leaves me pretty skeptical that this is a true meaning.
gattsuru
2yr ago
The accents and wax coat really added a lot, here. Nice job in general.
People tend to downplay shellac these days for anything deeper than spray-on solutions, but it does give a very distinct character that's hard to get elsewhere. It kinda feels like walnut sapwood, where you can do some fantastic things that everyone ignores because there's a 'standard' options nearby.
I will caution, if you've not heard it already, that shellac is extremely picky about thinners. You don't just want high-purity alcohol, but fairly fresh high-purity alcohols; even small amounts of water can cause splotchiness. I've heard of people going to the extent of buying Everclear or even laboratory-grade alcohols, but I've gotten better (if not great results) from popping open a fresh container of 99%+ isoprophyl alcohol with each project than from the hardware-store grade denatured alcohol unknown purity stuff.
You can run shellac (and almost anything) through a spray system, ranging from an airbrush (at the smallest scale) to a HVLP or airless sprayer (at the largest), if you're having too much of a pain keeping brush strokes down after thinning. Do have to be aggressive with thinner (I've gone >100% thinner) to have it flow well with a lower-psi airbrush. It will dry fast. Do have to clean out the sprayer, but tbh I find it easier cleaning out shellac than enamel paints or any type of stain.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Oh, yeah, there's absolutely a ton of hilarious stuff going on, including some drama. I'm still pessimistic, but the perversity of the universe trending to a maximum might even work in its favor, here.
New paper from the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposes that the high-temperature steep change in resistance may have been due to Cu2S contamination. That's nice in the sense that it's a fully honest explanation -- Lee et all's original paper could be entirely measuring real things, no fraud or even measurement goofup! -- but would leave their samples as just weird rather than superconducting. There's still some space for exploration, since the XRDs from other labs pointed more to CuS2 and this doesn't explain the 110K behavior supposedly observed by the Southeast University of China, but it drastically raises likelihood of a prosaic explanation.
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