George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
The things you lean on / are things that don't last
User ID: 107
As a single man I had two separate convertibles. Mainly because I love convertibles.
First, a 1966 Sunbeam Alpine which had been my father's. I accidentally burned it to the ground along with part of my parents' house in the summer of 1989. I had been driving it since 1986. I am pretty sure my dad bought it because he wanted to feel like Sean Connery in Dr No though that one was Robin's egg blue. I loved that car to distraction, drove it through my first years of university, had it repainted and the engine rebuilt and had just installed a new cloth top before the accident. Which is a long story.
Then a Toyota Corolla of my mom's, a Volkswagen Jetta which was the first car I paid for myself, then my first car in Japan was a 1993 Eunos Roadster aka Mazda Miata, used (8 years old when I bought it). I sold it when I got engaged. It was fun but Osaka isn't friendly to convertibles (lots of standing traffic.) I liked driving through the city at night though. Also it is possible to have sex in that car in the driver's seat with the hardtop attached. I am here to assure you of that, doubtful though it may be.
Since then nothing special. A Suzuki, a Toyota. Currently another Mazda but a CX8 Diesel which is primarily driven by wifey and which is much less my taste but carts the family around well.
Edit: Found a photo of me the Sunbeam (pre-torching.)
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d ago
"Meta AI isn't available in your country."
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d ago
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d ago
hate male
Laughed at the typo.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d ago
If I understand you correctly, you think:
Her posts are not provocative, just sincere curious inquiries.
She does noy stir up controversy, she's just interested in non mainstream things
People unfairly accuse her of being controversial. You can relate to this.
Close?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2d ago
She does half-assed twitter polls. That is not data science. I don't know of anything she's done that could accurately be described as data science
Thank you! Spot on. The confounders and limitations in her data collection are obvious.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2d ago
Perhaps it's Pollyannaish
You called it, right there. Not to say I don't sympathize. I've been called--online at least--a Pollyanna, a goody two shoes, and, once, a Candide. So it goes.
But this eventuality of "Aella's" should surprise exactly no one. The internet is the very definition of the mob. What's more surprising to me than that she unwisely pulled back the veil of Isis is her Captain Renault-like "shocked, shocked" reaction, which would seem performative if it weren't so pathetic. This was always going to happen and unless she does some serious scouring this isn't the end of it and it's only going to get worse.
I'm prone to quoting movies but that John Huston line comes to mind: "Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough." Unfortunately for this young woman it's far easier for a politician or building to last the requisite number of years. Easier for geiko I imagine, in that they are not technically prostitutes and do not base their charm in physical attributes alone (or even primarily), and create an exclusivity that the gangbanging harlot courtesan of many admirers doesn't.
That said, I'm with you in that I don't wish her ill. At the same time it's difficult not to feel some schadenfreude when I've long wished she would just stop her bullshit. Human nature suggests a doubledown and reversion to activism rather than the self reflection and life change I might prefer (but then I'm a judgmental Pollyanna).
Anyway what's for breakfast?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2d ago
I looked at his Twitter this am and regret it. Essentially, and this hasn't always been true I think, I am on the opposite side of most of his rants. I won't link them because they don't need signal boosting. I also notice he is followed by Jordan Peterson, for some bizarre reason.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2d ago
Regarding sperm:
Short-term abstinence may be associated with limited improvements in semen quality in healthy men but could be more beneficial for infertile men, especially within the first 4 days of abstinence.
Regarding testosterone:
These data demonstrate that acute abstinence does not change the neuroendocrine response to orgasm but does produce elevated levels of testosterone in males.
Also several bullshit studies. No credible peer-reviewed studies on cognitive or emotional benefits, beyond anecdotal.
YMMV, but oddly jacking off in the 21st century hasn't had much research.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2d ago
It is, in fact, that. It's an artifact of Chinese. To some degree this can be done in Japanese (三日か四日 for 3/4 days) or (三四天 in Chinese) but it's more common in Chinese. Don't rely on me as an expert but that's my take.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3d ago
I won't say you're unoriginal.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3d ago
Context, for those of us not in on it?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4d ago
I have before, and it's interesting to me as well why people do it. In my experience the AIs of just a few years ago were very clearly robotic (to use a word that might not fit) in that they would seem to "forget" things very quickly, even things you had just told them. Currently I think they're considerably better, but their popularity suggests that they're still overly positive and loath to criticize or call out the user the way a human might. In other words there is a narcissistic element in their use (the link is an internal link to a recent Motte post) where the user is fed a continual stream of affirmations in the self he or she is presenting to the AI. Hell on Reddit people are literally marrying their "AI boy/girlfriend."
I have a friend who is having issues with his wife, and has taken to interaction with AI in ways that I am not completely sure of except to say he's given it a name (feminine) and has various calibrations that he uses (one that is flirty, etc.) I can tell by speaking to him about this that he is engaging in what I'd consider a certain wishful thinking (asking the AI what it means to be real, to be alive, etc.) but it's difficult in such situations to tactfully draw someone back into reality. So I am untactful and say "It's not a She and it's not a real person, bro." This gets a laugh but the behavior continues.
I wouldn't discount the idea that this (treating Ai as a companion, romantic or otherwise) will all become extremely widespread if it hasn't already. How (and how soon) it will then become acceptable to the mainstream will be interesting to see.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4d ago
Allergies? Not my business, but that was always my fear as my boys were coming up. A bite of a piece of chocolate that was apparently near a peanut sent my one son to a hospital. Just hives, but I am happy to say they did the right thing and kept him overnight. Bi/multiphasic anaphylaxis precaution. The horror stories are usually because the epipen is treated as a one and done.
I just wrote a lot about allergies if you're talking about something completely different.
My friend from way back had a family beach house--it was right on the beach up from Eugene (somewhere in) Oregon though I don't remember the town--you could see the ocean right out the window, and to get to the sand and the water was a minute's walk down a short sloping hill. The beach was one of those long wide ones where you could splash your feet around, almost like a tidal flat--you'd go for meters until the water ever came as far as even your ankles. Truly beautiful. I stayed there once, two nights; we drank Full Sail bottled beers on the deck, ranged barefoot up and down the stretch of sand, flew kites, ate Mexican omelettes with homemade salsa and drank hot coffee there in the kitchen nook where you could watch the morning waves coming in. What a place.
They had money from a very well-known business owned by I think his grandfather, but something happened and there was a breakdown in relationships, and then everyone began squabbling over that house, and I think it was either sold or just torn down, or both. A terrible waste. My friend was (is) a very laid-back guy and just shrugged it off. Would have hurt me bad.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5d ago
FaceH would be clearer in this regard than faceh, which I assumed was a whole word with some private meaning for you, pronounced "FASS-eh." This is not to doubt that you have circulated through faces A to G, just to say this may explain why no one has asked.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5d ago
And that's fine. I've been burned a sufficient number of times on reddit to be comfortable with my (excessively) skeptical (or sceptical, if you like) approach to posts and interactions there. Which is why I included the caveat term "personally" as in "I personally." Certainly you and whoever are free to do whatever suits your own temperament. I was on reddit from around 2013 to 2021, and for a large part of that period it was fine, and I even felt somewhat at home. There was a time when I wasn't sure what was wrong, and then it hit me.
As for the issue at hand, it's difficult without an actual controlled test to have any sort of granularity in judging responses. Even the VVIQ test relies on a 5-point Likert scale, and it's not entirely clear how valid/reliable it is. Questions beyond simply "Can you see the apple?" and "Do you notice colors? Can you rotate it in your mind? Can you imagine a bite taken out of it?" and so on and so forth can help, but even then there's a lot of noise. Whether a number or even a great number of redditors chime in saying they have no visual image does not negate that in that moment in that house with those people I was with there may have been a lack of clarity, to say nothing of the fact that about half of the people were Japanese (and thus prone to conformity in a group setting) as well as interacting in a second language, adding another layer.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5d ago
I've always wanted to be able to refer to a family beach house.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5d ago
From what I can find the term aphantasia was first coined as recently as 2015 in a paper titled Lives without imagery.. This despite the existence of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire or VVIQ which predated the 2015 study by 40+ years.
The Guardian article you've linked makes the point at the end:
Keane’s work was proof that you do not have to be able to picture something to be able to draw it. “People had conflated visualisation with creativity and imagination, and one of the messages is: ‘They’re not the same thing.’”
I wouldn't suggest that creativity and visualization are "the same thing" but I think to suggest that there is no correlation between the two is counterintuitive, and bears investigation.
In a 2020 study Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing Zeman et al found evidence that aphantasics have deficits im object memory (what something looks like, its color, shape, size, etc.) but not spatial memory (location, relative distance from other objects, directions, layouts) and in fact in some cases aphantasics outperformed non aphantasics in this regard.
Also there seems to be no real difference in an aphantasic's ability to draw what they see (eg a still life) rather than what they imagine (Medusa, a leprechaun, etc )
Train is arriving, have to cut this short. Thanks for engaging.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5d ago
I personally take literally nothing from Reddit seriously. In qualitative study there are various traps researchers can fall into when it comes to relying on self-report. There are also strategies to control to some degree for this. Reddit is the wild west of unreliable accounts. I don't suppose it was always so, but trolls, edgelords, sock puppets, shit posters and pathological liars all seem to have ensconced themselves there fairly robustly.
I wonder if the ability (or lack of ability) to draw has anything to do with what I've heard termed aphantasia? This is not an original wonder, I expect. I was sitting around a table of men and women several months ago, and our host asked everyone to close their eyes and imagine I believe an apple (This was back in November.) I could see an apple in my mind, with a dark background, imagining the color of it from stem to bottom, red to pinkish to green-yellow, the way apples are sometimes mottled, and when we all opened our eyes, of the eight or so people there, I think only two of us said we were able to imagine it. My wife in particular said she just saw black. I was thinking this might simply be an artifact of how the question had been asked--an excess of honesty might produce "I didn't see it" because really there was no apple, I wasn't seeing a real apple with my eyes, it was in my "mind's eye" as it were. But if--and this assumes at face value that the host, his wife, the others there, and my wife simply could not visualize an apple in the way I could--would that have an effect on their ability to, say, draw an apple?
Many Japanese are almost stereotypically talented at drawing (my wife is not). Often however this means that they draw manga-type stylized figures very well, but not realistic objects. Then some of my students who are required by their histology instructor to draw, say, glomeruli in the kidneys can do so with impressive talent. Just with a pencil and eraser. Surely someone has studied this. I should look it up.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
6d ago
I do simply to save time. It knows my diet and quite a bit about my recent and historical medical results and it's easier not to have to remind it. If I were more cautious about privacy I wouldn't.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
6d ago
Out of curiosity and you don't have to answer: Did your military service contribute to this pacifism?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
7d ago
That isn't my point.
In Japan the wee hours is when most local road work gets done, so as not to disrupt day traffic.
More options
Context Copy link