Ahmed FASIH @22@octodon.social

Let me ruin your day:

“Male convicts had the chance to select a bride from the female factories by a system called 'convict courtship'. The male convicts came to the female factories to inspect the women, who had to line up for the occasion. If the male convict saw a woman that he liked, he made a motion at her to signal that he wanted to choose her. Most women accepted the offering. This process was often described as similar to the one in which slaves were selected.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_women_in_Australia

If my life was a manga:

"I went to bed too early last night and couldn't read any of the great manga I got yesterday, so I brought them into work to read, but I've been too busy with Real Work to read any this morning! 😭 waa!"

🤣

I just finished "Your Lie in April" anime and loved it so so so much that $130 dollars are firing lasers at my pants pocket, wanting to fly to A-1 Pictures/Sony and its backers. $130 *per* *set*, and there's *two* sets for the whole series.

(And no, I won't buy the Asian DVD boxset.)

Maybe I'll buy the manga, even though it's the anime I'd really like to support.

First world problems :).

Steam and Amazon and others let you “buy” a streaming copy of the show, which is also nice because

1- this is often much cheaper than collector Blu-rays, and
2- there's no physical copy so maybe a larger slice (of the smaller pie) goes to the publisher.

The only downside compared to "buy and donate to library" is the loss of the buzz generated by the library circulating it.

AnswerMan has gold this time—how ratings aren't relevant to most anime aired in Japan (long-runners excepted), since they're super-late at night; the advertisements are for other shows by the same producer; most people record/stream them; the real money for the anime comes from home video sales.

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2018-06-25/.133369

I'm sensitive to this because I feel bad that my favorite shows get a few pennies of my Crunchyroll subscription, so I tend to buy Blu-rays and donate them to the library.

Great title:

*The rush hour of the gods: a study of new religious movements in Japan*

(By H. Neill McFarland, 1967)

“When nature is choosing the outcomes, you can usually tell how to reduce risk. When playing with people, on the other hand, building a defense may invite attack, and success can encourage others to ally against you.” —Aaron Brown, *Financial Risk Management for Dummies*.

It's a tad bit more involved when the filenames have spaces: one trick is to replace the newline with the null character using tr and tell xargs to expect null-terminated rows—it then ignores spaces, etc. A real example:

cat bad.txt | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 -P8 -n1 -I% dropbox_uploader.sh delete "/Camera Uploads/%"

I have a list of bad filenames in bad.txt, and the superb Dropbox-Uploader https://github.com/andreafabrizi/Dropbox-Uploader will delete them eight at a time. #tr #protip

If you are doing something to a bunch of files, perhaps a shell script like:

for i in *jpg; do something $i somethingelse; done

and want a simple way to parallelize this, try xargs, which I love:

ls *jpg | xargs -n1 -P5 -I% something % somethingelse

will run on five files at a time. I've used this trick two or three times today in re-synchronizing photos from two phones and a camera and an SD card and Dropbox. #xargs #shell #protip

Arctic fox halfway between its winter and summer coats stole a duck egg! At Þingvellir, Iceland.

With full-res crop of the villain (cropped from 20 megapixels, with lens at 600mm (full-frame 35mm equivalent)).

https://octodon.social/media/EokXPUDc2RDfGG_vWDI https://octodon.social/media/4Scj-aBqNjQpdbRgz48

So the original study of white spots in the heart region of a fetus ultrasound used a lower-resolution scanner than later became available. Geneticists trained that “white spots in the heart area ~> Down’s syndrome” later saw high-res ultrasound imagery with a fair bit of noise—with *some* random collection of white pixels, think high-ISO digital camera photos—and wrongly thought “Down’s syndrome”?

Pernicious! Hard to imagine engineering a system to avoid such data-provenance-reasoning flaws.

I now see that my attempt to be more clear for an international audience might have been more condescending than considerate, sorry. I regret the basketball Michael Jordan joke in my post.

https://suegardner.org/2016/03/21/a-little-guide-to-working-with-online-communities/ has shaped my writing:

“Cultural references (sports, movies, history) may be meaningless. Even for those of us who aren’t American, it’s easy to come across as U.S.-centric … High diversity argues for a style that’s literal, straightforward, and well-structured.“

“Artificial Intelligence — The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet” is by a Berkeley professor who is a Michael Jordan of statistics and machine learning (and who is also named Michael Jordan) and goes very deep into issues I deeply care about.

https://medium.com/@mijordan3/artificial-intelligence-the-revolution-hasnt-happened-yet-5e1d5812e1e7

(Michael Jordan is an iconic basketball player from USA. No Amerocentrism here.)

Come for the discussion on data in medicine, stay for the evolution of society-spanning inference/decision-making systems.

Holy kami, the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies is fully open access!?:

http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/publications/jjrs/listofjournals/

Don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me for a few weeks.

Couple highlights:

Breen on the sale of Ise amulets: http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3020

Miura on kibyoushi, irreverent religious tales from the Edo period http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/4631 (which led me to https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=14826 “Jesus and Buddha have decided to take a holiday in Japan”…).

"[The Force] is a deity for a rationalist world. Even today we know that things don’t always turn out the way they should. Juries make the wrong decisions, computers still crash, even even two space shuttles—highly sophisticated though they were—failed and exploded during routine operations. Many find the white-bearded God untenable, but somewhere out there amid the comets and stars, there seems to be a moral force guiding us in the constant struggle of good versus evil"

https://steveawiggins.com/2014/11/29/the-force-re-awakens/

One of my hobbies: visualizing Christianity, or Buddhism, or the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, or (you see where I’m going with this), when they were in the same phase that Jediism is today.

“Jedi teachings are generally considered suggestions and guides rather than rules. This often brings about different approaches to the teachings among various groups. None are necessarily viewed as improper or incorrect” https://www.thoughtco.com/jedi-religion-jediism-95690

Like imagining a wizened elder as a mischievous toddler&vice versa

'The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it seems, is going the way of the somewhat more serious Jediism and Avatar religions in that people are deliberately electing fiction as their faith. Interestingly, this may not be a new phenomenon. We are told, for example, that Zarathustra deliberately outlined a new religion… In those days the strict division between fiction and fact may not have been a mental filter yet discovered.' https://steveawiggins.com/2016/04/20/prayer-before-meals/

From the Steve Wiggins NRM goldmine.

"Even should a founder have had less than pure motives, that doesn’t translate to any less verisimilitude on the part of the faithful. Some viable religions have been based on known fictions." https://steveawiggins.com/2015/04/06/new-faiths/

"Paganism began to reassert itself only last century. There had been a social stigma with lying outside the territory claimed by church, synagogue or mosque. … a large, and increasingly expanding, variety of religious options exist for the seeker." https://steveawiggins.com/2015/10/12/nature-of-religion/

"People are not becoming less religious—they’re becoming differently religious. The old sacred texts are being replaced by the fictional Necronomicon. Ethereal beings that have always been there are bowing before ancient aliens who aren’t really eternal or omnipotent, but who feel more real in our culture." —Steve A. Wiggins, https://steveawiggins.com/2016/03/31/cthulhus-tea-party/

I love Steve—I first heard about him when his brother-in-law Neal Stephenson cited their chats about Asherah for "Snow Crash".