AbouBenAdhem
@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
- Comment on What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with? 11 hours ago:
Do most public libraries have holocaust denial works?
- Comment on What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with? 11 hours ago:
Legally, you could buy a used copy if you could find one.
- Comment on How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? 3 days ago:
That depends on whether angels are bosons or fermions.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
I think it’s Staten Island.
- Comment on Does the average person know markdown? 4 days ago:
Most people are probably at least aware that there are contexts where you can use some basic, intuitive ASCII-based formatting (like asterisks for bullets) and it will get cleaned up to a prettier format when you post it.
- Comment on Pedestrians Walking on Right or Left? 1 week ago:
I think the general rule (that also applies on one-way streets, etc.) is that the pedestrian lane closest to traffic should face in the direction of oncoming traffic, so cars aren’t approaching from their blind spot.
- Comment on Iceland approved the 4-day workweek in 2019: nearly 6 years later, all the predictions made have come true. 1 week ago:
There were fears of a drop in productivity, increased costs for businesses and difficulties in adapting to maintain service levels. However, the Icelandic experience has swept these fears under the carpet.
I don’t think that metaphor means what they think it means.
- Comment on If the entirety of the internet was a computer simulation how would prove it? 1 week ago:
Look at phenomena that should be totally random, and look for evidence that they were produced by pseudorandom number generators.
- Comment on Can you read and understand this passage? 1 week ago:
I believe so—but I grew up reading a lot of 19th-century novels.
- Comment on What's the point of constitutional monarchies? Why even keep the monarchy in place if they aren't even doing anything? 1 week ago:
It’s like when you get inoculated with a weakened form of a live virus so you can build up an immunity to more virulent forms.
- Comment on How does Netflix, HBO and other services get their subtitles? Are they now using AI to help translate? 2 weeks ago:
The voice-over is usually trying to approximate the lip movements and timing as well as the meaning.
- Comment on What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around? 3 weeks ago:
Even if every human on earth had their own pet since dogs were first domesticated ten or twenty thousand years ago, their ancestors were facing the stress of migrating into new and unfamiliar environments for several hundred thousand years prior to that.
- Comment on What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around? 3 weeks ago:
Beneficial mutations are random, but the odds of them persisting are proportional to the frequency of the events in which they affect our fitness. And the proportion of stressful events in which pets were available would have been only a fraction of the total number of stressful events our ancestors experienced.
If pets are available for 10% of the stressful events we experience, the selection pressure for stress reduction that doesn’t require pets would be ten times greater.
- Comment on What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around? 3 weeks ago:
That’s a personal benefit, but it’s not necessarily an evolutionary benefit. If it were an evolutionary benefit, our bodies would generate that response spontaneously without needing an external stimulus that wouldn’t have been available to many of our ancestors.
- Comment on How would you run a society? 3 weeks ago:
Accept that there’s going to be political diversity and social change (for better and worse), and try to create an overarching framework to channel it into something other than violent conflict. One idea:
Let societies do whatever they want, but institute a “risk mitigation’ tax (or other form of resource redistribution) based on size and similarity: if a social strategy is popular and widely adopted, it’s taxed at a marginally increasing rate until it reaches an equilibrium level; and the revenue is used to fund more experimental social strategies. This flips the historical dynamic on its head: instead of each society trying to forcibly convert the rest of the world to its own system, each society has an interest in discouraging others from following its example.
- Comment on If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed? 4 weeks ago:
I claw my way out of a few feet of soil, and walk about thirty minutes to where the local Olhone maintained a ceremonial shellmound from 800 BCE until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1700s. By all accounts the Olhone were chill hunter-gatherers, so my best bet would probably be to befriend and join them.
They’d be more knowledgeable than me about everything in the local environment, so I don’t think I’d have much knowledge that would be of use to them. (They seem to have known of other nearby groups that practiced agriculture, but saw no need for it.) I might eventually consider traveling north or south along the coast, but many other groups in western North America practiced warfare and/or slavery, so I’d probably be best off staying put.
- Comment on With Tim Pool in the White House Press Pool, will we ever find out what's under that beanie? 4 weeks ago:
So “Tim Apple” is CEO of Apple, and Tim Pool is on the White House press pool.
Does Trump just believe in some kind of obligate nominative determinism? If I call myself “Tim General”, can I sit on the National Security Council?
- Comment on Why are popes always really old? 4 weeks ago:
It’s an emergent phenomenon—institutions will naturally behave in ways that increase their power without that being the conscious intention of any given member.
- Comment on Why are popes always really old? 4 weeks ago:
The older the average pope, the shorter the average term, and the more papal elections in a given span of time.
One of the main powers of cardinals is electing the pope, so more papal elections means more power for the cardinals.
- Comment on What accent would I even have? 5 weeks ago:
Any accent of English, including more recent ones, perceived as a mixture of American and British English, and often perceived as incorporating the prestige speech of one or both countries
- Comment on Do you use your blinker in a car? 1 month ago:
Using it 75% of the time is harder than using it all the time, because it means you’re consciously thinking about it each time instead of doing it instinctively.
- Comment on It's a sin in Christianity to consume media based on ancient mythology and folklore? 1 month ago:
Plenty of writers in the early Christian church continued to reference Greek and Roman mythology as a source of literary analogy—so a background knowledge of classical mythology is required to fully understand foundational Christian literature.
- Comment on Now that the US is under influence by Russia, what will happen to Whistleblower Edward Snowden? 1 month ago:
I doubt Trump will do anything that could be perceived as encouraging more whistleblowers, at least while he’s in office.
Best case—a Democrat wins the next election, Trump gives up on trying to stop it, and pardons Snowden on his way out.
- Comment on How do you pronounce "centaur" and why? 1 month ago:
If it’s in a Greek or ancient Latin context I pronounce it with a hard C, but if it’s a general English context I pronounce it with a soft C.
I’m not sure what the third way would be.
- Comment on Why Titles Are Written Like This? 1 month ago:
The same reason we capitalize peoples’ names, since a title is the proper name of a written work.
- Comment on Mother 1 month ago:
After the predator instantly becomes enamored with the adorable baby quokka, and calls her own kids over to play.
- Comment on Hey, do americans just want to take a break from normal politics for a bit and focus all our efforts solely on the wild boar problem? 2 months ago:
Some animals are more equal than others!
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
In theory, authoritarianism is the fastest way to transform a society from one form to another—so it’s rational that regimes that take power based on the promise of rapid social transformation will be drawn to authoritarianism.
But it’s also rational for institutions to try to preserve themselves—which for these authoritarian regimes means preserving the conditions that led to the belief in their necessity, instead of delivering on the promise of transformation that would lead to their dissolution.
- Comment on If any external factor made you create art, would your art be created by that factor? 2 months ago:
I guess in that sense you could say the only “creator” is the Big Bang.
- Comment on Between Linux or Windows which do you think will be first to have a viable OS for quantum computers? 2 months ago:
Quantum circuits aren’t general-purpose computers—they’re added to conventional computers to allow them to perform a small handful of algorithms more efficiently. I don’t believe any of those algorithms would benefit a general operating system enough that an OS would be modified to require the use of one.