nednobbins

@nednobbins@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We're just scanning for the bear...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Many of them likely aren’t immediately useful to most people but here goes.

  1. I got older, got a few degrees, got paid a bunch and have been living in areas with extremely low street crime. I could probably pass out in front of my house with a Benji sticking out of my fly and it would still be there in the morning.

  2. I quit drinking. That wasn’t an issue when I was a kid but later on it provided 2 huge benefits: 2.a) My situational awareness is never impaired. 2.b) It eliminated the vast majority of situations where someone might find me an interesting target.

  3. I spent an absurd amount of time practicing and studying martial arts. The fighting parts of that aren’t that useful but many RBSD (Reality Based Self Defense) classes are actually practical. tl;dr It’s now fairly easy to find actual statistics on many forms of violence, look up the most likely ones for you, find the proven counters and practice those. For example, I’ve done a ton of drills that are a variation of shoving an attacker, yelling “Get away from me you PERVERT” (because while people tend to ignore cries for help, everyone wants to know who the pervert is), and running away.

  4. Closely related to 3 is the general realization that you don’t need to make yourself immune to violence. It’s hard to be a good fighter and it’s hard to make yourself the least attractive target. It’s pretty easy to avoid being the most attractive target. For example, men are often targeted by men who want to exert dominance. Looking tough is counter productive because the attacker gets more glory from taking down a tough guy than a wimp. Looking batshit crazy is pretty effective; if I feel like I’m being followed and there isn’t a convenient escape I smack my head a few times and start arguing with “the voices”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We're just scanning for the bear...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you. I’ve taken a much more holistic approach. It’s worked very well. Haven’t been mugged in decades.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We're just scanning for the bear...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I was mugged in the playground of my building, the street across fine my house, my lobby, and at 57th and suttton, all in Manhattan. Then a few more times when I lived in Baltimore. I really hope most women don’t get raped that often.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We're just scanning for the bear...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As a fellow paranoid person I assume you also make some effort to concral when you’re looking around; tie your shoe, check yourself out in a store window, watch reflections on cars, etc.

  If some sketchy guy is following me, I want to know, without them knowing I know.

  We had people come into our grade school to give us advice like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's barely a science.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sort of. They won’t say that 2+2=5. The errors are in the isomorphism they claim and the empirical assumptions they make.

  Two of my favorites:

  1. Almost all of economics assumes normal distributions. We have good reason to believe that almost no economic variables are normally distributed. That means we routinely underestimate tail risk. We do it anyway because that’s the only way we can get the math to work.

  2. Almost all of modern economics assumes utility functions with transitive preferences. Testing shows that even the economists who published those theories don’t have transit preferences.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's barely a science.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Economists’ math is as good as anyone else’.

  The main problem is that economies are incredibly chaotic systems and all the math that humans can actually read described them poorly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So much...⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Kurt Gödel wrote a whole paper on it.

  He used math to show that all statements, in any language, can be expressed as math statements. He then proved that it’s impossible to create any cpnsistent set of math statements that completely describes everything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨true love is rare⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Are there any lab scientists that don’t hate their pipettes? My wife used to complain constantly about getting cramps from those things, especially those multi-drop dispensers.

  Her explanation was always that biotechs can afford robots to do the pipetting but academia is budget constrained and grad students are (were) cheaper than robots.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If it works it works⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  <puts on nerd hat> Normal people rarely see the above image. When you look at Jupiter with the naked eye, you see a slightly brighter dot. The only way to tell it’s not a star is that it changes position relative to them from day to day.
  If you look at it with a good pair of binoculars, you can see that the dot seems to be slightly bigger than other dots. You still can’t see the red spot.
  If you look at it through a telescope with a 10" objective and 100x magnification, you can definitely make out the red spot and you can make out that the rest of the planet has some texture.

  An image that clear and crisp takes some very expensive equipment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Remember the past⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I hear if you stay for one more spin it takes you to goatse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Remember the past⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The term was originally coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 in, “the Selfish Gene”.

  The main problem with that definition of the word is that it’s really hard to use. It requires both the speaker and the listener to be comfortable with the fungibility of data and code.