monotremata

https://xkcd.com/605

I mostly agree with you. The AND was kind of crammed in outside the list too, though; they’d written it as NOT bullet: limit 1, bullet: limit 2, AND bullet: limit 3. Basically I don’t think it’s implausible that they intended it to be maximally restrictive and just screwed that up. I just think that applying the law as though it means that requires interpreting the law differently from how it’s written, and different in a way that harms the defendants, which you previously weren’t supposed to do. Which seems super dumb.

I wasn’t suggesting the lawyers or the Justices should have talked about DeMorgan’s law, but rather that it would have been a helpful point for Mother Jones to bring up in the article, to make sure people are on the same page about the logic. You’re right that the notation is probably not helpful though.

The actual legal argument is pretty simple. The law as written is maximally lenient, but also not very logically consistent (e.g. the redundancy indicated in the article). So it seems like some kind of error occurred in the law-writing process. The question is whether they actually meant to write it as maximally restrictive or whether they screwed up in some other way. That certainly seems like ambiguity (a stance supported by the evidence that multiple courts decided these cases in different ways), and the prior standard was that in the case of ambiguity, you had to interpret the law to the benefit of the defendants, which here would be maximally lenient, and indeed also as written. The supreme court has basically reversed that, saying that you can interpret it as maximally restrictive as long as you’re pretty sure that’s what they meant to say. That’s a very different standard.

I think this case is maybe the equivalent of that photo of a striped dress that blew up the Internet a few years ago. Nobody thinks it’s particularly ambiguous, but they come to totally different conclusions about what the obvious correct answer is; just because the ambiguity isn’t necessarily obvious to the individual reader doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Yeah, I feel like the article should have made reference to De Morgan’s Law in order to explain the two interpretations. That’s the one that says !(A && B && C) = !A || !B || !C, and !(A || B || C) = !A && !B && !C.

In English, there’s no proper grouping operator, so it’s basically it’s a question of whether you distribute the NOT or the AND first over the list.

The Justices are saying that the ambiguity is completely resolved by the way the restrictions don’t make sense if you interpret it the other way. But the underlying assumption there is that the laws of this country are logical, free from needless repetition and contradictory requirements, which is a TERRIBLE assumption. Our laws are at best written by a committee of people not very familiar with the subjects of those laws, and at worst written by scam artists who then paid to slip them under the radar and into the books. They’re full of idiotic errors, deliberate sabotage, and absurdities. That’s the whole reason for the thing about the lenient interpretation, and this decision will change that in a way that gives judges a whole lot of power to do more harm.

Bud Clark for the win.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/78/Expose_Yourself_to_Art.jpeg

I’m not sure it’s just on Reddit…

Honestly what the homework is probably looking for is that it’s equivalent to “B or not A.” But yeah.

Reminds me of Javert.

https://i.imgur.com/H4sq6h8.gif

It’s also used for sending huge amounts of data long distances. “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” That’s usually attributed to Andrew S. Tanenbaum, but wikipedia follows that with “other alleged speakers include…” so take that with a grain of salt. They do note that the first problem in his book on computer networks asks students to calculate the throughput of a Saint Bernard carrying floppy disks.

You know that the other two words also exist though, right? Like, you can effect change in an organization, and there can be something strange in the affect of a psychopath. So there’s a verb “to effect” and a noun “affect” (although here the pronunciation is different–the accent is on the first syllable). It’s true that the most common usages follow the rules you’re laying out, but it genuinely is an oversimplification.

It’s less of an appeals process and more of a peel process.

I wouldn’t really call it a favorite, but I definitely ended up liking Nier: Automata pretty well after bouncing off it really hard when trying it at a friend’s house. That’s because we were trying from the start, and it starts with a section that’s about half an hour long, with only two checkpoints, vastly harder than anything else in the game, and in which the first half isn’t even the same genre as the rest of the game. It’s seriously one of the worst intros I can think of in a video game. The rest of the game is, y’know, a pretty good third-person action RPG.

Yeah, you’re right. This is something I was taught at one point, and I guess I never questioned it because it sounded plausible. Sorry! I have updated my comment to reflect this.

It’s also because the bacterium in question is anaerobic, so it dies in an oxygen environment; rusting consumes oxygen, so it helps preserve the bacterium longer out of soil.

Edit: I had always been told this, but evidently it isn’t true. The rust does not seem to have any effect on the bacterium that causes tetanus. Apologies for spreading misinformation.

Fakespot used to reveal more about how they detected fakes, but as you say there are obvious issues with that, as it's a bit of an arms race. They don't just look at the text of the individual review though. Folks who buy reviews tend to get them from "review farms" that do reviews for a lot of products, and they don't have an infinite number of Amazon accounts to use for that, so there are network effects that can be powerful indicators, and that aren't easy for manipulate.

Good sci fi usually isn’t about the future, aliens, etc. It’s about the present, but portrayed in a strange way so as to bypass your existing preconceptions about the situation, so you can look at it with fresh eyes.

Gluten kicks ass. It’s easily the best fake meat base. I remember in college cooking a meal for my roommates and them saying afterwards “wait, aren’t you vegetarian? did you cook this just for us and not eat any?” and having to explain that no, that wasn’t beef, it was wheat gluten and mushrooms and miso. They were dubious, saying, “well, to me this is just really tender beef.”

So yeah. I’m also disappointed that gluten has gotten such a bad rap. I’m waiting for this knowledge to trickle back into the convenience foods sector so I can buy this stuff and not have to make it by hand every time, and it seems like I’ll be waiting a long time.

I dunno. Is it gluten-free?

Attention is a kind of surplus mental capacity that we have, which isn’t specialized, but can instead be directed to tasks as needed. Ironically, we also use the term for the dedicated mental system which directs this extra capacity, which makes talking about it a bit more complicated.

Most of the stuff we do, our brains just kinda handle for us. Walking is usually like that; it’s an incredibly complex feat of dynamic balance, movement planning, and adaptation to changes in the environment, but it rarely takes any conscious effort on our part. Conscious effort is directed attention.

Yeah, it’s not there for me. I’ve got “view your profile,” messages (which is a fakeout, as you can’t actually view them on the mobile website), groups, marketplace, friends, “videos on watch”, pages, dating, saved, memories, events, games, “climate science information center”, “ads manager”, “orders and payments”, “most recent”, settings, dark mode, “privacy shortcuts”, language, help, “support inbox”, about, “report a problem”, and logout. No feeds. I’ve never seen it.